Topic: Christmas
I played it recently to start off our Christmas recital, only days after the mall shooting here. Because I thought it was especially pertinent.
More pertinent because of the story that brought it to us. The story of the writer of the words, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" is American--I had always assumed it to be European.
The message came from deep inside Longfellow in 1864, months before the Civil War ended. Not only was Longfellow against the war and saddened when his son went off to fight, his agony was multiplied because that son had recently been seriously injured. It was an injury that left him crippled.
Yet the war and his son's condition had not started the writer's despondency. That had occurred when he'd lost his second wife to an untimely death, leaving him with a houseful of children to raise. The event of her death had been so traumatizing that he must have suffered from PTSD for years afterwards, perhaps still at the time of writing this carol.
This wife had set her dress on fire by accident while in the room with their children. She'd run to him in her terror, where he was working in his study. Longfellow had tried desperately, but in vain, to save her. In the process, he'd been seriously burned himself, so seriously that he had not even been able to attend the funeral as his children mourned this sudden loss.
It wasn't his first loss of a wife. Decades earlier, his first wife had died of a sudden illness at a very young age.
The raging war seemed to be nowhere near the end that Christmas Eve when he sat down to write "for hate is strong and mocks the song." Yet, somehow he found enough sanity to look at possibilities that must have seemed totally idealistic that Dec. 24th. Somehow he found enough faith to state his belief: "God is not dead, nor does He sleep. The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, good will to men!"
OK--maybe it's way too idealistic for how you are feeling today. Maybe you can't tolerate the traditional way of envisioning God. Nor the gender issues of the words themselves. Some of it bothers me at times, too, I'll admit.
For 1964, with a brilliant man who had sustained great losses and could only envision something in his fantasies, it still gives me a lift each time I hear it. More so, each time I play it.
So what carol are you most likely to "play" this year?
