Santa Baby, I Love Christmas Music

Current! In Carmel - #6 – Christmas Music
Spirituality column – December 19, 2006

Santa Baby, I Love Christmas Music
By Bob Walters

I love Christmas music – at least from the morning after Thanksgiving until about dinnertime Christmas day – and rely on it to hearken annual Christmas feelings of warmth, peace, love, family and most importantly … the love of Christ.

Gotcha! You thought I was going to say “most importantly … presents!”

So much Christmas music is about presents. Isn’t it odd that so many songs about “the season of giving” celebrate getting presents, not giving them?

Think about it. Other than “The Christmas Shoes,” which captures perfectly the soul-saving magic of selfless giving (it’s sappy, very sappy, but totally on-message), name a Christmas song that is about me giving to you.

It’s hard to come up with one.

Actual Christmas carols (like in the hymnal at church) praise God’s gift of Christ. The secular holiday songs that aren’t about sleigh bells, sleigh rides, reindeer, shopping, decked halls or mommy kissing Santa Claus, are mostly mood setters (The Christmas Song) and sentiment triggers (Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, White Christmas).

I’m not sure where to categorize Santa Baby.

Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is what we listened to every Christmas Eve dinner as I was growing up and I love it dearly. But it’s in German so I have no idea what it says. Bach’s Ein Feste Berg (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God) has nothing to do with Christmas except I love listening to the E. Power Biggs pipe organ rendition of it Christmas Eve.

My favorite hymnal carol is O Holy Night, although any large-choir rendition of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing or Joy to the World sends chills up my spine. You can’t beat the peace of Silent Night.

Not-so-classic renditions abound. “Twisted Sister’s” heavy metal Oh Come All Ye Faithful, new this year, ignites no sentiment but I have to admit makes me laugh.

“Barenaked Ladies” (yep, that’s a real music group) and Sara MacLachlan have on the airwaves a decent, up-tempo recording of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (period English translation of the title, “May God Keep You Gentlemen Strong”). No matter who sings it, the song’s second and third lines zero in on the heart of Christmas:

“for Christ the Lord our Sa-a-vior is born this Christmas Day,
To save us all from Satan’s pow’r when we were gone astray.”

Did you know the Puritans banned Christmas carols in England, including this one, from the late 1600s until strait-laced Queen Victoria brought them back to popularity in the mid-1800s? Carols were folk songs the Puritans viewed sacrilegious.

Today Christmas songs express our deepest feelings and (sometimes) our deepest beliefs. Even if theology takes a holiday, the truth is that Christmas music is about whatever special thing it means in our heart and how it unites everyone, politically correct or not, with the community of Christ.

The Father, Son and Holy Spirit must work overtime on this one.

Walters, a Carmel resident, can’t sing. Contact him at rlwcom@aol.com.