Annie Burrows's Favourite Christmas CarolOne of the things I like best about Christmas is singing all the seasonal hymns of celebration that you just don’t get to hear at any other time of the year.
I love ones that evoke the weather, such as “In the Bleak Midwinter”, even though I suspect it is a highly inaccurate depiction of the nativity. Do they have snow in winter in Bethlehem?
I love the slightly bizarre tale of “Good King Wenceslas” and his hapless little page boy, being dragged out in all that snow to deliver food and wine to “yonder peasant”. At the church I used to go to when I was little, the congregation always used to split into parts, with the men taking the words of Wenceslas, and the ladies and children the little page boy.
But my all time favourite is “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing!” John and Charles Wesley, who headed a great revival in England, made sure that they encapsulated the full gospel in the words of that hymn. I sometimes wonder why it is never sung at any other time of the year, but is, inexorably associated with Christmas time.
The tune itself is stirring, particularly when you get to the verse where you can have a go at singing the descant part. (In my case, to the detriment of anyone’s ears in the near vicinity.) And so it was, that when I was asked to write a story to go into a Christmas themed anthology, I found myself wandering round the house, singing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” with great gusto. Well, while everyone else was out, anyway, so that they could not complain.
And the line that particularly inspired me was, “God and sinners reconciled.” I soon found myself wanting to write a story about reconciliation, and second chances.
That, to me, is what is at the heart of what people truly celebrate at Christmas, be it in a cottage in Regency England, or now, in the glitzy twenty-first century.
