A Christmas Carol

How carols carry old words and lost worlds into this world. A Thought for the Day for BBC Radio 4.

Hark… that’s a word that’s dropped out of common parlance. Actually, like the word parlance itself.

But in December, hark makes a comeback… when we hark as the herald angels sing.

Antique words, polished up, return to us in Christmas carols — words like tidings — the glad sort — or halls that are decked, for instance with boughs of holly.

Many of us will recognize a favourite carol in the next couple of weeks — if not in churches then singing or humming as we pass pop-up street choirs or hear an old familiar on the kitchen radio.

Carols return to us lost moments and lost loved ones — a scene at school, how your Mum used to love that one.

Shepherds watching their flocks, lowly cattle sheds, the silent stars going by. O come all ye faithful… as well as those who doesn’t feel so full of faith.

It’s not essential to buy all the ideas a carol may carry — lo he abhors not the virgins womb etc — in order to enter the bigger story being told.

Hope born on the edge of history. The human longing for ‘Peace on earth and mercy mild.’

Rhyme and meter matter but the words less than the tune — the emotional rise and fall of the melody.

Carols time-travel. They carry old words and lost worlds into this world.

I never learnt poetry by rote and can’t recite it by heart but I can sing entire lengths of carols… as I can more recent Christmas hits like Fairytale of New York.

The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl came up with a modern folk classic, but carols often pinched tunes from old folk songs, even from pagan songs that celebrated the winter solstice at ancient druid club nights.

Carols freight a lost lexicon, quietly carrying a dream through the long nights of history. The hopes and fears of all the years / are met in thee tonight…

The best sort of carol is a musical cathedral — placing us in another kind of story, where everything looks a little different.

If singing can calm anxiety and lift the spirit, if it can boost social connection, there’s also something deeper.

Singing is about a kind of yearning — a longing to express in music what’s so difficult to capture in words alone. And to express together what’s so difficult to say alone. The playing of the merry organ / sweet singing in the choir…

There is beauty in being lost in a rising round of carol song — in a church or on the street — when your own sound is lost in a greater sound.

However discordant any given day, we may still find ourselves, just for a moment, to be in tune. To ‘rest beside the weary road / and hear the angels sing.’