In the bleak midwinter

We're under about six inches of snow with The Bond release scheduled for Tuesday at Durham's The Regulator Bookshop (fingers crossed!) So I am calming the jitters with Christmas music.

My favorite is "In the Bleak Midwinter," based on a poem ("Christmas carol") by English poet Christina Rossetti and originally published by Scribner's Magazine in 1872.

I guess it shouldn't surprise me that Rossetti also wrote for children. The poem is very visual and tactile, with a lovely repetition reminiscent of modern picture books. Her language takes us right into the stable with the new addition to the family. The listener/reader is also invited in powerfully, with the final stanza about the gifts we all can give.

Historically, of course, the language is nuts. It very rarely snows in Bethlehem and certainly doesn't freeze "hard as iron." We actually don't know when the historical Christ was born (some scholars have narrowed it down to late summer or fall), but it certainly wasn't in midwinter. Likely, the choice to put Christmas on December 25 was more about supplanting pagan or Jewish festivals celebrating the solstice and turn of the earth back toward the light than accuracy.

Prior to the publication of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" (which he began writing in 1843), the English people didn't make much of Christmas. Easter, with its themes of rebirth, was much more in line with Anglican worship. According to John Forster, Dicken's biographer, Dickens was obsessed by his story, wanting to capture not only the sights and sounds of English winter but also the Christian values he believed in.

"He wept over it, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself to an extraordinary degree," Forster writes. "He walked thinking of it fifteen and twenty miles about the black streets of London," often at very late hours of the night. The streets were black because of the smog created by coal-fired heating. Dickens liked to wander on Christmas Day, "past the areas of shabby genteel houses in Somers or Kentish Towns, watching the diners preparing or coming in."

Rossetti's family home would have been one of those families (in Camdentown) struggling to keep body and soul together, at least until Rosetti's popular poetry book, Goblin Market and other poems, was published to much acclaim.

Unlike Dickens' tale (which I love and read every Christmas), Rossetti's poem is not moored in time or space. Like the Christmas story itself, the poem adapts to whoever is telling it for the people listening. The poem contrasts the brutality of life with the tender scene inside the stable, the farm animals drawn into the scene. Christ is a King and a baby in arms, adored by his young mother. They will go out into the storm again. I feel that dreadful moment of Mary's son's execution coming. But she the space of the song, they are warm and protected. as every mother and new baby should be.

For a laugh, here is Alexandra Petri's ranking of Christmas songs from worst to best (Rosetti's poem ranks midway). "This song is extra," Petri writes, "and I like that it is extra... This is something I would have listened to in high school and felt seen."

So again with the appeal to children!

Here is an absolutely heart-wrenching and lovely instrumental version, by cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, music by Gustav Holst.

And an equally lovely rendition by the King's College Cambridge choir.

My other top Christmas song is Robert Earl Keene's "Merry Christmas from the family" (quite a different vibe and too bad Alexandra missed it!). Watch the video and tell me what you think!

In the Bleak Midwinter
Christina Rossetti

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

Our God, heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty —
Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom Cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom Angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.

Angels and Archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air;
But only His Mother
In her maiden bliss
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.

What can I give Him,
Poor as I am? —
If I were a Shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man
I would do my part, —
Yet what I can I give Him, —
Give my heart.