Neo-Carols, Old Traditions, and Good News

According to VK, Xrlq doesn’t like new Christmas carols.

To any budding, aspiring or actual artists who may read this blog: It’s OK not to write any more songs about Christmas. It’s OK not to do a Christmas album if you haven’t done one already. Of all the Christmas albums that have come out in my lifetime, only two (OK, maybe three) are worth listening to anyway. Maybe yours will be too, but the odds are against it. if you must sing about the season at all, write a song bitching and moaning about how much it sucks to have to clear snow off your driveway or start your car in sub-zero temperature. We need more songs about that. We don’t need any more songs to remind us what happy holiday Best Buy is trying unsuccessfully to hide from us.

I have some sympathy with the last sentence. (I would cheerfully spend tons of money at a chain which didin’t put out their Christmas decorations until Thanksgiving week.) But … no new songs, no new carols?

Let’s not throw the Christ Child out with the reindeer.

Christmas is not just an old social tradition for many of us. It is an annual renewal; a reminder of the beginning of the best myth ever told… a eucatastrophe which really happened.

Like the rest of the Good News, it isn’t just a tale for them, back then, over there. It is good news here. Now. For US.

Somewhere, there’s someone noodling over a piece of paper. Or fiddling with a keyboard. Someone who is entranced with the Good News and the wonder that is the Nativity. That person is writing the next Silent Night… the next Jeannette, Isabella… the next Holly and the Ivy.

And I long to hear it.

So bring on the new albums. Let the new songs ring forth. This is no “closed class”… for Christmas isn’t a “closed class” either, mummified and “traditional” in the dry, musty sense.

Good Christian folk, rejoice in very truth!