We’re hardly the best choir in London. We never rehearse and we only ever meet once a year when we sing Christmas carols in a shopping mall. And although we’re all English, we’re not exclusively Christian.
This year, for instance, although we had three lapsed Catholics, a former Methodist, a chap who vaguely thought he might be Church of England and an unchristened Christadelphian, we also included a Sunni Muslim who provided a beautiful descant and a Hindu who is now wavering between atheism and agnosticism. And, oh yes, there’s our leader, too. She’s Jewish.
What’s more, because we perform in a part of West London where there is a sizeable Middle Eastern population, it’s clear that a fair proportion of those who hear us sing about Baby Jesus and the Three Wise Men, and who then dip ever generously into their pockets, are Arabic, and therefore unlikely to be Christians.
Indeed the man who made the biggest donation this year, in the form of a twenty pound note, was Algerian.
So what’s going on? This is hardly a hundred per cent case of “good Christian men rejoice”. Yet I suspect that our little ensemble may well represent hundreds of thousands of other choirs around the country who, during these weeks of Advent, will be sharing with those who hear them the real spirit of Christmas. In other words, the season of goodwill and giving.
Because, be it Handel’s Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall or Hark The Herald Angels as sung by a gang of grinning teenagers at our front doors, Christmas music is a magical accompaniment that somehow helps promote and encourage that goodwill.
Our choir sings to raise funds for research at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital following the death from leukaemia of one of our friends, an actor called David Adams, a number years ago. Other choirs support other good causes.
And what is fascinating, even life affirming, to see is how extraordinarily generous people are when those familiar carols begin. Even this Christmas with recession on everyone’s doorsteps people were giving.
There we sang, watching shoppers of all ethnicities as they passed by dropping their coins into our collection tins. Most people were smiling. Some who knew the words joined in momentarily as they walked by. Few frowned or ignored us, while little children, as always, wanted to stop and listen.
So what is it about Christmas carols that so quickly embraces nearly everyone, that actually makes people want to give? Were we to sing Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody, would whole throngs stop and listen and then move so readily towards our collection boxes?
I don’t think so. It wouldn’t be the same. Slade might be all very well for the office party—well, they might—but people respond differently to carols because they represent an innocence that unites us all, whether or not we are Christians. And, in doing this, carols are not only the most enduring of Christmas decorations, they are also the most useful.
Be it at the pre-school carol service when young parents weep joyfully as four year olds innocently mangle the lyrics of Good King Wenceslas; or at the supermarket check-out as Bing Crosby croons Silent Night while our money is carried away on that conveyor belt of credit; or perhaps when we’re waiting in the rain or sleet for the bus, laden with shopping, as a Salvation Army brass band brings us Oh Come All Ye Faithful, traditional Christmas music, as much as anything, helps make Christmas what it is—-a time when generosity and smiles triumph over differences.
So when I read, as I do almost every year, about some local authority killjoy, who, decides to ban municipal carol singing, usually because the lyrics might offend those of other religions, I want to invite him or her to come to our little sing-song to show just how wrong they are, how carols unite rather than divide.
In Britain carols are the music of the people, all the people. They always were. Originally they were folk songs which celebrated the mid-winter festival, which is why we still sing songs about holly and ivy without so much as a mention of the ox and the ass in the stable. It was only in the early Middle Ages that they took on a Christmas significance when the two festivals merged into one.
For some mad, fundamentalist reason Cromwell and the Puritans in the Seventeenth Century didn’t think carols were appropriate music for singing in church, and an act of parliament was passed deeming that the singers had to stand outside the church. From there developed the tradition of carollers going from house to house entertaining each other.
And in this way was a tradition born which would end, among a million other places, in our West London shopping mall. Indeed it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that carols became part of church services again, which is why the lyrics of so many sound so very Victorian—providing images that last a lifetime.
In our mind’s eye newly fallen snow is forever “deep and crisp and even”, while Christina Rossetti’s poem, In The Bleak Midwinter, later put to music and just voted the best carol by a BBC poll of British and American choirmasters, has been the inspiration for thousands of newspaper headlines and Christmas cards. And who can forget the little mice who come singing carols outside Moley’s modest home in The Wind In The Willows?
In the First World War it was famously said to be the sound of German soldiers singing Stille Nacht (Silent Night) in the opposite trenches that provoked the Christmas ceasefire of 1915, when groups of the opposing armies played football in no-man’s land. While in World War II prisoners of war held carol services in their camps.
Today only one person in fifteen will go to church at Christmas, and Yuletide, as it is often hideously called, is very largely a festival of consumption. But the glossy commercials, the exhortations to spend and spend on perfumes and Playstations, booze and vanity, don’t capture the whole human picture. They miss the spirituality completely.
The traditional Christmas story of birth, innocence and good triumphing over infanticide and evil, and its spirit of peace and goodwill, is more potent than any passing TV commercial, and, put to music, is central to the ethos of what some miseries would now like to call the Winter Holiday.
I know there are those who say that carols in this modern age are unfashionable, just historical tosh, and that our reaction to them is purely sentimental. But I would disagree. The sentiments that carols invoke, those of charity and generosity, are never out of fashion.
They are what Christmas is about, whether or not you are a practising Christian. They are what hope is about. And, though we may scarcely realise it, it’s that sense of universal goodwill that we learned in childhood that we are responding to as we smile inwardly when from somewhere in the shopping distance we hear: “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed…”
And if you think the sound of carol singing makes Christmas shopping that much more bearable, let me tell you, it’s a hundred times better when you’re doing the singing.
