OT Advent Calendar Day 14: Strange Christmas

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 theme is Strange Christmas.

The Advent and Christmas seasons, as full of expectant nostalgia as they are, occasionally result in some very strange musical expressions. Today we’ll look at three. One is a parody of a Christmas song, one a Christmas parody of an artist’s catalog and the third is, well, we’ll get there when we get there.

“ACTUALLY, BRYAN, IT’S AN EXCELLENT DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS”

The above was said to me by a psychiatrist at an office holiday party where I’d managed to slip this song into the rotation. It was a different time. I worked in mental health at the time.

The  quartet of medical students responsible called themselves The Four Skins and the only record of theirs I know of is as thoroughly silly as the above. I’ll spare those who’ve decided to skip listening to the song a peek at the lyrics.

“DASHER.” “YES, SANTA?” “I WANT TO KILL YOU”

The song speaks for itself, really. Though I’m no fan of the Doors, using their catalog as the object of a Christmas-focused parody is brilliant. The execution is brilliant. The moment where the singer—is that Mr. Mojo?—screams wordlessly is disturbingly hysterical if one knows what lyrics he’s not singing.

About Rudolph.

Rudolph, the most useless of reindeer. Why Santa thought a single red light would help him see on a foggy Christmas Eve is beyond me.

O HOLY SHICOW

A couple of years ago, my mother in law, a wonderful lady, was in the presence of my wife and children and responded to some shocking event with, “Holy Shi-cow!”

It was a noble effort, despite the fact that both boys knew exactly how she originally intended to end that exclamation.

I had a similar response when learning of the history of this absolute Christmas classic.

It  has a beautiful melody—perfect for the soloist to show off—the lyric perfectly matches tone and intent and the listener, overwhelmed with both, will thrill the moment the penultimate “devine” hangs delicately in the air.

Bryan?

Yes, Andrew?

You said the theme for this Saturday was “Strange Christmas.”

I did.

There’s nothing strange about this.

Not yet, dear managing Editor. Not yet.

Where things get strange is the history of the song, its composers, its translator and its audience.

A poem written at the request of a local parish Priest to celebrate the refurbishment of the church’s organ, “Minuit, Chrétiens!”, by Placide Cappeau made its musical debut, set to music composed by Adolphe Charles Adam, in Roquemaure, France, in 1847.

I’m no theologian, but I will say that the song appears to be somewhat heterodox considering that the intended audience was Catholic, what with a—presumably shirtless—Man-God descending from Heaven looking to kick ass and take names. There was a definite whiff of heresy about the song. Closet Pelagians must have rejoiced.

This was not particularly a problem until Cappeau left the Church and espoused Socialism.

Amid a press orgy the moderns would envy—it went on for the better part of a century; in 1923 there were imputations that the song was bad because Adolphe Charles Adam might have been Jewish, though there is little evidence of this, and even if he was . . .—the song was nominally banned, but remained popular in France.

In 1855, an American writer and staunch abolitionist, John Sullivan Dwight, was taken by the music and the images suggested by the lines “Chains shall He break/For the slave is our brother” and wrote his own translation which survives in the Anglosphere until this day.