’Tis the season of festive muzak, here’s who to thank, or blame
Pa rum pum pum pum;
IT’S a safe bet that at some time during the Christmas season you will hear, and possibly even sing, traditional carols. As I thought about it, I wondered about their origins.
The more contemporary songs are fairly easily tracked down — for example White Christmas, which became a worldwide hit. It was composed in 1940 by one of America’s great songwriters, Irving Berlin.
At the time, film director Mark Sandrich, one of the great masters of Hollywood sentimentality, heard the refrain Berlin had composed and thought it was perfect for the film he was making, Holiday Inn.
A schmaltzy romantic comedy, its two male stars were Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. America was at war — Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7 1941 — and the film, which embodied the themes of family, children and tradition, resonated deeply among soldiers on the front line far from home.
The film, released in 1942, opened in the Christmas season and the Armed Forces Network was flooded with requests for the song White Christmas, which stayed on the Billboard charts for 12 weeks. The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Christmas carols reach far deeper than we may think. Consider Silent Night, which was composed in 1818 by Franz Xaver Gruber with lyrics by Joseph Mohr. They lived in a small town outside Salzburg in Austria.
People heard the carol and it spread though Austria. In 1859 an Episcopalian bishop, John Freeman Young, heard it and wrote an English translation. The carol will forever be associated with an amazing but true event that occurred in 1914 — the “Christmas truce”.
It was in the first year of World War 1. On the night of December 24, the weather was freezing, and the trenches in which the men were bunkered were full of slushy mud.
Then, on the German side, soldiers began lighting candles and raising the lights above the edge of the trenches. The British sentries reported this to their commanding officers who saw through their binoculars that some of the Germans were holding Christmas trees over their heads, with lighted candles on the branches.
The Germans were extending holiday greetings to their enemies on Christmas Eve, and they did it by singing Silent Night.
One by one, British and German soldiers laid down their weapons and ventured into noman’s land, a patch of bombed-out earth between the two sides. As one of the British officers said, “An undeclared truce had erupted and peace had broken out.”
The soldiers sat around a common campfire. They exchanged small gifts from their sparse belongings — chocolate bars, buttons, badges and small cans of processed beef. Men who only hours earlier had been shooting to kill, were now sharing the Christmas spirit and showing each other family snapshots. It was a brief interlude, and as dawn broke the men went back to their bunkers.
Some familiar carols have long histories. For example, Away in a Manger has been attributed, possibly falsely, to the 16th-century German reformer Martin Luther. The carol was published in the May 1884 issue of The Myrtle, a periodical of the Universalist Publishing House in Boston, Massachusetts, under the title Luther’s Cradle Song.
The Little Drummer Boy, based on a traditional Czech carol, was written by American composer Katherine K Davis in 1941.
The carol that has stuck in my head since I was a child went like this: Christmas is coming, The geese are getting fat, Please put a penny in the old man’s hat, If you haven’t got a penny, A ha’penny will do, If you haven’t got a ha’penny, Then God bless you.
Amen!