Liturgy and Music: November 2004 Archives

Now is the time to pour out your wrath upon your least favorite Christmas songs. The musically feeble, the quasi-blasphemous, the cringe-inducing, the silly...vent your righteous criticism in the comments box.

Here are some of mine:

"Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" wasn't funny the first time I heard it. It's even less funny the hundredth.

"Wonderful Christmas Time," by Paul McCartney. If it weren't Paul McCartney, nobody would play this insipid '70s synthesizer-driven trash. I note that Disney Corp.'s animatronic doll Hillary Duff has remade the song. Great! I look forward to hearing it in Macy's!

"Santa Baby." Creepy, creepy, creepy. Sexualizing a children's fantasy is always bad.

"I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus." Totally inappropriate and...oh, wait — I think this is only sung by the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington. Nevermind.

"Last Christmas," by George Michael. This guy was responsible for more than his share of bad '80s lyrics ("Guilty feet ain't got no rhythm"), and this is a choice example:

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
The very next day, you gave it away...

What are your favorite Christmas songs and hymns? For myself, I still love hearing "O Holy Night." "Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day" is a lovely and blissfully non-ubiquitous song. Corelli's Christmas Concerto in G minor is probably my favorite piece of Christmas chamber music (I wrote about it last year.) I don't have a favorite hymn, but "Adeste Fideles" gets my blood moving.

As a public service, I would like to issue my annual reminder that the Hallelujah Chorus is for Easter, not the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior.

Yesterday, we sang the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as the recessional hymn. Only in "Gather," it's listed as "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory." Wouldn't want to use the common title! So bellicose!

I could live with the name change, but I can't take the politically correct bowdlerization of the hymn's words themselves.

Verse 3: "He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgement seat"
becomes
"He is sifting out all human hearts...."

Verse 4: "As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free"
becomes
"As he died to make all holy, let us die that all be free."

Which, I suppose, is a little better than "let us live to make all free," which is another variation I've seen. Who dares to do such things? Probably the same people who lecture us about the integrity of "art" and the "artist." Unless the artist is dead, and the art in question's copyright has expired.

Somebody made these changes so that "men" is not used as a generic plural noun for male and female human beings. The rationale is that women are oppressed when such a thing gets printed in a hymnal.

The reason this is stupid -- and I apologize if you think "stupid" is name-calling, but the adjective is perfect -- the words of the hymn were written by Julia Ward Howe. As the name implies, she was a woman!

To all those who want to impose their feminist ideas on the rest of us by changing the words to one of the most well-known and beloved hymns in American history, I have four words of advice: Write your own damn hymn.

Amen.