What
are Christmas Carols, anyway? When did
the carols tradition start? Why are these
songs called carols and what does the word carol itself mean? Where are Christmas carols performed
nowadays? Should we still talk about
Christmas carols or rather Christmas songs?
“A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens seems to indicate that the word simply means a story.
Here is one of my favorite Christmas carols.
Not
that long, looong, looooooong ago, around a hundred years ago, in Anno Domini
1914 (nineteen and fourteen) some very, very bad people told their servants who
they called citizens to make them feel proud about themselves, to spend
Christmas in dirty, muddy, stinking, freezing, dug into the ground wholes
called trenches and to celebrate the most holly of the holy-days by shooting at
one another to kill each other. All in
the name Jesus Christ, the Savior.
The
generals, who were spending the Holidays with their families in the warmth and
coziness of their own peaceful castles, were even so kind and generous that they
decided to send thousands of fresh cut Christmas trees to the killing fields to
show their loyal men how considerate and caring they were about their soldiers
who with time started dying by the millions and later came to be known as the
cannon meat.
At
first the troops were making fun of the gift and didn’t want to accept it as an
act of extreme hypocrisy. Facing the
firing squad for refusal to follow the orders they decorated their unfortunate
dwellings and waited for the first star of this Eve or Christmas Star to come
up.
Here
and there somebody started humming Silent Night Holly Night …
Little
they knew that this is one of the most world-wide Christmas Carols, a true web uniting
all people of good will, reaching far beyond and above Christianity. Little by little the hum got louder and
louder. Soldiers started adding words in
their own languages: English, French and this carol's original language - German. In no time this humble Christmas tune turned
into the most potent prowess and the hymn of peace prevailing in this war time
all over the front lines during this not so silent night, but a very holly night. With time, at the beginning very carefully,
some heads showed up above the defense lines.
Eventually, the troops came out and met up to spend the holiday together
regardless of their nationality, denomination and faith making it a one-night
unofficial but truly spirited armistice.
Do
you want to know what happened next after this Truce of 1914? No, this story doesn’t have a happy
ending. Just like Jesus Christ was tried
for supposed crimes and died on the cross for all of us for believing in eternal
and ever-lasting peace, some of the soldiers were tried for treason and
executed. The generals made sure that
the next and following years soldiers didn’t have Christmas trees …
Have
Yourself a Very Merry and Peaceful Christmas and a Silent Night Holly Night! (video + lyrics)
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