OT Advent Calendar Day 13: God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen & We Three Kings

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?

Today’s tunes are “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and ”We Three Kings.”

I love these two songs individually and have since I was a child and we’ll get to all of that. These two songs are not only Christmas classics on their own, but were covered in a live radio performance by an iconic Canadian artist and the Barenaked Ladies.

Do I dislike the Barenaked Ladies?

Yes.

It’s mostly because of the voice of Steven Page, who sang a number of their hits. He also got caught with a pile of “snow” in Fayetteville, New York in July. I grew up in Upstate New York. Fayetteville is snow country, but not in July.

But I confess they and Sarah McLachlan did a bang up job with this version.

“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” is one of the oldest Christmas carols still in general circulation and, given it likely dates from the 16th century, it’s remarkable that the first verse has survived almost intact:

God rest you, merry gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,
Remember Christ our Saviour
Was born on Christmas-day
To save poor souls from Satan’s power,
Which long time had gone astray.
And it is tidings of comfort and joy.

This version is from The Beauties of the Magazines of 1775—I could swear that was a rejected title for Ordinary Times—and while there are several changes from the modern, I’d like to highlight two. The first is the movement of the comma to follow the word “you.” This makes sense. “God rest you,” meaning “God give you rest,” with the “you” being “merry Gentlemen.” Having the comma between “merry” and “gentlemen” does my head in, though for all I know it may be perfectly justified.

The second is the presence of the word “you” in the first line at all. It turns out folks wanted it to sound suitably old and changed the pronoun from “you” to “ye.” It’s unclear, but this may have happened by the middle of the 19th century and if not by then by the early 20th.

“We Three Kings,” originally entitled “Three Kings of Orient,” was written in 1857 by John Henry Hopkins Jr. for the Christmas Pageant held at the General Theological Seminary in New York City and became quite popular among his friends. He published it in 1863 and it became a hit.

 Granted, I’ve only scrolled through so much of YouTube, but it appears impossible for music video directors to avoid using sand in videos for this song.

I’m not sure what’s going on here, frankly.

The last thing I will say is that the bassist for the Barenaked Ladies is called Jim Creeggan and I would like to meet him because his surname appears to be being pulled through a wormhole into our universe.