What is in Kelvin's Head?

10 Correct Opinions About Christmas Carols

27/12/2018
Public service announcement.

The following opinions are all correct.
1. The first carol on Christmas Day should always be Christians Awake Salute the Happy Morn. It should be sung lustily and with the last line repeated.
2. While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night may be sung to almost any tune. It must not, however, be sung to the tune Winchester Old
  - Acceptable tunes shall include:
    
    Liverpool
    
    Glasgow
    
    Lyngham
    
    Old Foster
    
    Sweet Chiming Christmas Bells
    
    Cranbrook – This may only be used once in every decade in any one place. There’s a limit to how entertaining it is.
3. The best carol of all is It Came Upon the Midnight Clear and it must be sung to the tune Noel by Arthur Sullivan. There are many things in which the US based Episcopal Church is correct but it is incorrect in its choice of tune for this carol. It may also be sung at Michaelmas. The incorrect words “It Came upon a midnight clear” are anathema. They have as much place in the Christian faith as Sundays before Advent or Sundays before Lent – ie none whatsoever.
4. Jingle Bells is not a carol.
5. The carol Of the Father’s Love Begotten may be sung at any time from Advent Sunday until the Feast of Candlemas. It must only be sung to the words agreed by Mr Frikki Walker and myself. The verse about seer and sybyl must always be included as it is both profound and reminds us all of Sybil Fawlty. I have every intention of broadcasting this carol unto the nation at the earliest opportunity so that everyone else may copy the St Mary’s version of the words.
6. 10 points may be claimed for anyone spotting a heresy in any carol. A bonus of 50 points is awarded to anyone who can come up with a heresy-free version that people will enjoy singing.
  - Your starter for 10 is “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see” which sounds like Docetism to me.
7. Anyone claiming that carols should be sung “in the original version” shall be required to sing Hark How All The Welkin Rings at the next carol service they are at and will then be required to explain to everyone at the door what a welkin is.
8. In the Bleak Midwinter may be sung, even though Jesus probably was not born amidst snow. However, it may only be sung by a good choir singing the Harold Darke version.
9. O Come All Ye Faithful is a Jacobite rallying call and is most proper for Scottish Episcopalians to sing.
10. Christmas cake should be eaten with cheese and not marzipan and icing.
Thank you for your attention.
Christmas carols

9 responses to “The Lament Question”

kimberly

12/08/2009

ask it in the singular, and the answer is: because you’re a four.

you’ll have me playing the funeral ikos next.

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kimberly

12/08/2009

the other answer is about possibility being revealed in limits.

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kelvin

12/08/2009

Its not just me though, and not just fours.

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Aaron Orear

12/08/2009

I think because sorrow touches the core of the human condition – we are mortal but can perceive immortality. “He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Eccl. 3:11)

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Erp

12/08/2009

I understand Aristotle talks about catharsis and various philosophers have followed up on that idea.

Perhaps it arouses sadness both from the art itself but also from our own sources festering within and allows us to let go. We feel better for the letting go, the lessening of our own internal sadness, and so perceive the art as beautiful.

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RosemaryHannah

12/08/2009

Kimberly was there before me. However, even I, a nine, can sometimes see the beauty in sad things. For me they do two things (may be more but two are most obvious). The first is the catharsis thing. The second is to make me less lonely. Look, here am I weeping, but all around me people sit in the same sorrow. It is not just my sorrow – I am not alone.

I have long thought there is another answer, one I do not properly understand but I have (I think – and who am I to think it). Deep in God there is a huge well of sorrow. Unless we experience sorrow we cannot understand God. When we sorrow we tap into that well, and become closer to him.

And being a nice cheerful nine, I will now add that I live in hope that having sorrowed with him, we will share also and even more fully in the joy which swallows the sorrow. Delete this last paragraph from your mind on reading, it will only spoil the joy of the sorrow.

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Elizabeth

13/08/2009

Edgar Allan Poe said the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful, dead woman. Nice, eh?

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Ritualist Robert

14/08/2009

Surely it’s because the concept of beauty is independent from concepts such as ‘sadness’ and ‘happiness’ – just as a G major chord might be loud or soft, but that volume has no effect on its G major-ness.

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Steve

14/08/2009

I remember Augustine saying (don’t ask me where) that for a picture to be beautiful it requires dark colours as well as bright.

There is also a hint of an answer in this poem by Edwin Muir:

Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.

Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.

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