Christmas Hymns

I’ve meant to blog more on here than I have so far this season. Though I have thought about our blog now and then over the past couple weeks, I keep busy and don’t have a lot of time to sit down and actually write something.

Considering the Christmas season has actually begun now, at least by my estimation, I thought I should make some time to write.

I decided some years ago to observe Christmas from the day following All Saints Day to New Years Day. There’s something that really makes me happy thinking about Christmas and listening to Christmas music. So, I thought, if I extend the season, I get to enjoy it longer. I think I came up with this idea not too long after I learned about All Saints Day. I really took to the idea of an alternative to Halloween. As the holiday brings in the month of November, it and Christmas are like the bookends to the last two months of the year. We can begin this time of year in hallowed thought and close it out with the same.

All Saints Day is more antiquely known as All Hallows Day. I am not exactly sure what the Catholic church had in mind when the name was established, (of course the holiday is a rebuttal to the day preceding, All Hallow’s Eve … Halloween … just for explanation), but in considering the use of the word hallow – “to make holy, to keep as sacred” that is an excellent way to usher in the Christmas season as we celebrate the incarnation of our Savior.

Each evening when I rock Abby to sleep for the night, I usually sing her a few hymns. Some weeks before this start of the hallowed season, I started mixing in some Christmas carols for variation. Now that’s all I’m using. I think about the words to those seasonal hymns sometimes as I sing them. There really is a wonderful meaning in some of them. That’s part of what gives me that joyous feeling this time of year, listening to those songs. I recently purchased some carols from Fernando Ortega’s new Christmas CD. I added them to my Christmas Music playlist in my iPod. It’s up to 23 songs now, most of them carols. There is a place for the lighthearted music of the season, but there is so much more meaning in the Christmas hymns. I wonder if some people, never exposed to the Christian Faith, can really enjoy Christmas carols, or maybe have never even heard some of them. It’s so wonderful not only to enjoy the majesty and beauty of the melodies of the carols but also to sing them as praise for the message they bring.