OT Advent Calendar (& Hanukah!) Day 1

Advent has always been my favorite time of year. Not only does it lead up to the festival of Christmas, but my birthday falls right around half way through. What’s more, I grew up in snowy Central New York—that’s the barren hinterlands of Upstate, for those in the city so nice they named it twice—and if I didn’t get a White Christmas, the Great Lakes were good for a storm around my birthday so there’d at least be a good beginning to the winter.

Advent is far from an untouched subject around these parts, so I’m clearly not alone.

Your OT Advent Calendar this year will be musical. We’ll talk about diamond-in-the-rough traditional tunes just waiting for renewed popularity, crimes against Christmas, the silly songs and the songs that have become modern traditions. We’ll also talk about the notion of true Christmas Carols, those which address the twelve days festival beginning on Christmas itself, including not just the one day-counting song but another. 

Let’s dive in, shall we?

Todays songs are “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and “Moaz Tzur,” also known as “Rock of Ages.”

For the first week of Advent our theme is that of wassailing.

Wassailing, though still performed in pockets in England where the tradition began, is a form of group singing which will be initially out of place for Americans until they understand that the tradition has become less drunken, violent and adult in the twentieth century.

The scenario, at its worst, involved the peasantry occupying the front parlors of their Lord’s homes and making of the occupants hostages who could only be freed by a ransom of food and booze.

You can imagine where it went from there.

In its more innocent guise it was a form of feudal exchange, wherein the peasantry would travel to the houses of their lords and—in an act clearly distinct from begging—exchange gifts of food and beverages in exchange for blessings and well wishes, a sort of mutually accepted exchange of gifts.

The twentieth century version of this is trick-or-treating on Halloween, of course. Tricks are for all intents and purposes gone—unless one observes the night before Halloween, in any of its various names—and it has become all about hosts distributing treats.

This sort of door-to-door wassailing was traditional on Twelfth Night, not the play[LINK]—though that title likely indicates the date of its first performance—but rather on the last day of the Christmas festival. Though the date of Twelfth Night varied throughout the centuries and calendars it is now, in the Roman Catholic tradition, January 6th, the Epiphany.

The most familiar of these tunes is probably “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” which has persisted, in my mind, due to the jovial simplicity of its lyric and melody. Though this may not be the most traditional of wassails—it is not—it presents the type of a door-to-door wassail.

“We wish you a merry Christmas

We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year

Good tidings we bring to you and your kin

We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year”

A mere kind, thoughtful greeting from a chorus to an audience, yes? Consider this, however, the second verse:

“Now bring us some figgy pudding

Now bring us some figgy pudding

Now bring us some figgy pudding and bring it right here

Good tidings we bring to you and your kin

We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year”

There are things I like very much about John Denver and the Muppets’ A Christmas Together and others I do not. One that I do like very much is Animal’s repeated “Won’t go!” in the third verse.

“We won’t go until we get some

We won’t go until we get some

We won’t go until we get some so bring it right here

Good tidings we bring to you and your kin

We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year”

If this is not a Christmas hostage situation, I don’t know what is. Now that I think of it, Hollywood—which has abandoned anything even resembling creativity for lazy reboots and brand recycling—might want to bring to a theater near you a zany Christmas comedy on this precise premise.

Yo, Hollywood, hit me up. I’ve got proposals.

I digress, however, as I am wont to do.

What we have in this song is clearly a—what I would hope is playful—variant of the trick-or-treat tradition. The home invasion and gift demanding are both there with all of the potential danger that the involvement of alcohol would suggest.

Today is also the first night of Hanukkah. I’ll turn it over to my great friend Cantor Jessica Epstein of Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston, New Jersey.

The final benediction Ma’oz Tzur, concludes the candle lighting ceremony with what is probably the most widely known Hanukkah hymn text. The poem is the creation of one Mord’khai, apparently a 13th-century Ashkenazi poet whose name appears as an acrostic in the initial letters of each of the five stanzas.

The text refers to four principal instances of deliverance of the Jewish people from its oppressors. The fifth and final stanza offers a twenty-four-word summary of the Maccabean struggle, along with the traditional legendary account of the miraculously burning oil. The singing of Ma’oz Tzur apparently was well established as part of the Hanukkah candle lighting ceremony in Western and West-Central Europe by at least the early 15th century—and quite possibly much earlier.

Full lyrics can be found here.

For a complete ethnomusicological explanation of the piece by preeminent musicologist Dr. Edwin Seroussi, click here.