Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas (9 page)

I
n 1849, a Unitarian minister from Wayland, Massachusetts, was writing a Christmas Eve message for his congregation. As Dr. Edmund Sears worked on his sermon, he was a troubled man. Though it would be another decade before a civil war tore the United States apart, the debate over slavery, compounded by the poverty he saw in his own community, had all but broken the man’s spirit. He desperately searched for words to inspire his congregation, but he was having a problem lifting even his own spirit above the depressing scenes that surrounded him.

Sears, then thirty-nine years old, had been educated at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and at Harvard Divinity School. Though the Unitarian church was known for not exposing the divinity of Christ, Sears preached the divine nature of Jesus in his weekly sermons. He believed that Jesus was the Son of God and had died on the cross for man’s sins. He also believed that every Christian should be involved in reaching out to the lost, helpless, and poor.

In his community Sears was a force of caring in a world that seemed to concern itself little with the traumas of the hungry or the sick. His burden for the helpless forced him to reach out each day to those Christ called “the least of these.” Yet as he worked on writing an uplifting Christmas message, it was the poverty and the hopelessness of the people he touched in the slums that sickened his heart and blocked his progress. He must have wondered how he could write about the Light of the world when the world seemed so very dark.

As Sears struggled, he thumbed through his well-worn Bible. In the second chapter of Luke, the minister was touched by the eighth and ninth verses: “And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.” After considering the miraculous nature of that long-ago moment, Sears picked up his pen and jotted down a five-verse poem he called “It Came upon the Midnight Clear.” He then retrieved from his files another Christmas poem he had written a decade before: “Calm on the list’ning ear of night comes heaven’s melodious strains.” Beginning his message with his older Christmas poem, he quickly wrote a short sermon and decided to end his Christmas service with the inspired words of his newest poem.

Today Sears’s poem turned carol is considered joyful and uplifting. Yet when first delivered, its audience probably saw it as more a charge or challenge than the story of a miraculous birth in a faraway land. While the minister wanted his congregation to celebrate Christmas, he also wanted them to reach out to the poor, to address the nation’s social ills, and to consider what they could do as individuals to best reflect the spirit of Christ in their daily lives. In other words, he wanted to see
people look to heaven and understand how God needed them to serve man in his name. Nowhere was this message more obvious than in the poem’s second verse, one that has been discarded and all but forgotten.

Yet with the woes of sin and strife The world hath suffered long;

Beneath the angel-strain have rolled Two thousand years of wrong;

And man, at war with man, hears not The love song which they bring:

O hush the noise, ye men of strife, And hear the angels sing!

Not only was the beauty and wonder of the Christmas story woven into a lyrical fabric that was rich and meaningful, but Sears also managed to point out that God, in the form of a child, was entering a world that sorely needed his help. He wanted his congregation and the world to hear those cries as he did.

Since Sears was a magazine and newspaper editor in addition to being a preacher, he had the means to bring his new poem to a wider audience than just his church. The
Christian Register
, one of the publications for which Sears penned features, printed “It Came upon the Midnight Clear” in its December 29, 1849, issue. Yet, as is so often the case with inspired work, it would take a second man to breathe lasting life into the poem and make it a Christmas classic.

Richard Storrs Willis was a Yale graduate who had been composing choral pieces since his youth. After graduating from college, the native Bostonian furthered his education in Germany in the 1840s by studying with Moritz Liepizi and Felix Mendelssohn. In 1848 he returned to the United States and became the music critic for the
New York Tribune.

An avid reader, Willis probably found Sears’s poem in the
Christian Register.
Earlier the composer had written a tune he called, simply, “Carol.” He discovered that this melody perfectly fit with the lyrics of the poem. Willis’s combination of music and words was first published in 1850 with the uninspired title, “Study Number 23.” A decade later, using a new, updated arrangement, Willis republished the song as “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night.” It is this second version that is still sung today.

Within a decade of its second printing, “It Came upon the Midnight Clear” had been adopted for use in a wide range of denominational hymnbooks. As the tradition of caroling spread from New England and was adopted throughout the country, the song became a standard for roaming bands of Christmas choirs as well. Yet it wasn’t until the twentieth century that the carol would become one of the world’s most popular Christmas messages in song.

During World War I, American troops sang “It Came upon the Midnight Clear” throughout France during the holiday season. Thus the song went to war and came home with a generation of men who made it a part of their holiday traditions. Twenty-five years later, U.S. troops took the song back to the front lines of World War II, and entertainers such as Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore performed the haunting carol throughout the Pacific and Europe at U.S.O. shows. For homesick soldiers, no words
seemed to voice their own prayers of “peace on earth” as well as those penned by Edmund Sears a century before.

The lasting impact of the song is probably due in part to its last verse. In that stanza Sears begged the world to sing back to heaven the song of hope, peace, love, joy, and salvation. Although “It Came upon the Midnight Clear” has been sung millions of times since Sears first read his poem on a cold Christmas Eve in 1849, most Christians have not yet joined together to cure the world’s ills and bring peace to all men. The author’s charge, and indeed Jesus’ own call, remains largely unanswered.

J
ingle Bells” is perhaps the most well-known, most sung Christmas carol in America. For millions, this simple little song is as much a part of Christmas as Santa, reindeer, greeting cards, family dinners, evergreen trees, mistletoe, and presents. Yet in one of the season’s greatest ironies, “Jingle Bells” does not contain a single reference to the holiday with which it is associated and was actually written for a completely different day of celebration.

Medford, Massachusetts native James S. Pierpont had always shown a great deal of musical talent. As a child he not only sang in church, but played the organ. As an adult, Pierpont continued to assist his father, the pastor of Medford’s Unitarian church, by working with the choirs and musicians. Around 1840 young Pierpont was given the assignment to write special music for a Thanksgiving service. As James sat in his father’s home at 87 Mystic Street contemplating his
chore, through a window he watched young men riding their sleds down a hill. Bundling up to ward off the extremely cold weather, Pierpont stepped outside. Caught up in the moment, recalling the many times he had also raced sleds and sleighs sporting bands of merry, jingling bells, he not only watched, but also began to root for the participants. Within an hour he was congratulating the day’s winner.

As he stepped back into the house, a melody came to him; while he warmed himself by the fireplace, James hummed the little ditty. Feeling as if this just might be the foundation for the music his father’s church program needed, Pierpont threw on his coat and trudged through the snow to the home of Mrs. Otis Waterman. Mrs. Waterman owned the only piano in Medford. When the woman answered the door, James matter-of-factly said, “I have a little tune in my head.” The homeowner was familiar with James, knew what he wanted, and immediately stepped aside.

As he sat down at the old instrument and worked out the melody, Mrs. Waterman carefully listened, then said, “That is a merry little jingle you have there.” When he finished a few moments later, the woman assured James that the song would catch on around town. Later that evening, Pierpont combined his “jingle” with his observations of the day’s sled races and his memories of racing horse-drawn sleighs. Just that quickly a legendary song was born.

James taught his “One Horse Open Sleigh” to the choir at the Medford Church. The fully harmonized arrangement was then presented at the annual Thanksgiving service. Since Thanksgiving was the most important holiday in New England at the time, there was a large audience when “One Horse Open Sleigh” debuted. The number went over so well that many of the church members asked James and the choir to perform it
again at the Christmas service. Although a song that mentioned dating and betting on a horse race hardly seemed appropriate for church, “One Horse Open Sleigh” was such a smash at the second performance that scores of Christmas visitors to the Medford sanctuary took it back to their own communities. Due to the fact that they had heard it on the twenty-fifth of December, they taught it to their friends and family as a Christmas song.

Pierpont had no idea his little jingle would have such infectious power; he knew only that folks seemed to like his “winter” song. So when he moved to Savannah, Georgia, he took “One Horse Open Sleigh” with him. He found a publisher for the song in 1857, yet it was not until the
Salem Evening News
did a story about the carol in 1864 that James truly understood he had written something special. By then, the song was fast becoming one of the most popular carols in New England, as well as rushing across the man’s adopted South. Within twenty years, “Jingle Bells” was probably the best known caroling song in the country.

As one of the oldest American carols, this “Thanksgiving song,” with its rural imagery of snow, sleighs, and jingle bells, has impacted more than a century of Christmas images in greeting cards, books, movies, and scores of Christmas songs.

Pierpont’s rather strange Christmas song has been recorded hundreds of times. Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Les Paul all landed on the charts with “Jingle Bells.” The most popular recorded version of the song belongs to Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. The
little merry jingle can also be found in numerous Hollywood films and television shows, and parts of it have even been used in other Christmas songs. Bobby Helms’s hit, “Jingle Bell Rock”—inspired in large part by “Jingle Bells”—has become another well-known modern secular holiday offering.

Today “Jingle Bells” seems to be everywhere. Even though few people have even seen a one-horse open sleigh, millions have jingle bells hanging from their doors at Christmas. Most paintings of Santa show jingling bells adorning his reindeer. And scores of holiday songs and television commercials begin with the jingle of bells. Thanks to James Pierpont and a Thanksgiving request, when people see a picture of snow and a horse-drawn sleigh, their first thought is of Christmas.