Christmas Carols In Old America

By Patrizia Barrera

Story of the most beautiful Christmas Carols of the American tradition

An intriguing and funny overview on the story of the Christmas carols linked to the American tradition. Entertaining anecdotes, behind the scenes stories, scandals, gossips of the past times, belonging to an America that does not exist anymore. Everything you dont' know about the old America's most beautiful Christmas carols, you will find in this book, written with passion and entertaining spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tektime
• Release date: Apr 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9788835422617

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Patrizia Barrera

Christmas Carols in Old America

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Table of contents

Copyright

CHRISTMAS ORIGINS

ROCKING AROUND THE CHRISTMAS TREE

RUDOLPH, THE RED NOSED REINDEER

FROSTY THE SNOWMAN

WINTER WONDERLAND

WHITE CHRISTMAS

JINGLE BELLS

LET IT SNOW!

JINGLE BELL ROCK

THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY

BLUE CHRISTMAS

SLEIGH RIDE

I'LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

I SAW MOMMY KISSING SANTA CLAUS

THE CHRISTMAS SONG

AMAZING GRACE

MERRY CHRISTMAS , DARLING.

SANTA BABY

I HEARD THE BELLS ON CHRISTMAS DAY

Who Am I?

Credits

Copyright

Copyright Patrizia Barrera, 2021

All Right Reserved

Rha Production

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Traduzione Inglese

di DANILO PERSICO

CHRISTMAS ORIGINS

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It may be hard to believe but Christmas is actually a pagan feast. It was actually rather a feast reserved to wizards and witches that used to dance around a tree or, much more likely, around stone circles on the winter solstice day, that is on 22 nd December. It was an orgiastic celebration, with dances, grass and sex, to propitiate the favor of the gods in the winter period, that in ancient times was really frightening.

Its origin? Some say it came from Druids culture and it had Celtic roots. If any of you has ever read Asterix and Obelix comics can, in a funny way, get a gist of it, even though these people’s esoteric tradition was much more complex. The period is from IV to III century B.C. and the place is the British islands but with expansions to as far as Italy , Iberian peninsula and Sweden. We know them as BRITONS and the Stonehenge mystery is what probably tickles us more of their past, rather than their religious traditions. Yet all the Christmas magic and enchantment we still feel today derives from these extinguished people.

Romans, that defeated Celtics and colonized their territories several times, absorbed their customs and traditions and that was how the winter solstice feast became a tradition of the Empire. The celebration of Winter solstice was actually present in several cultures: in ancient times natural cycles were well observed and the fact that the shortest day, and therefore the seeming abandonment of the sun, occurred around 21 st of December was a well known phenomenon, but not considered automatic. The sun was a life giver god; and as all gods he was prone to excesses, grudge and acts of violence. Therefore men needed to get in good with it, so that it continued to donate its warmth. The days immediately following 21st of December were therefore lived with terror and fear by ancient people, especially when light got inevitably weaker and nights longer. Man could be confident that the sun was back and that a new year was beginning for humanity only on 25 th of December, a day when, for a series of astronomical laws that I’m not going to explain here, the sun seems to be born again, powerful and victorious.

In a few words there’s a new birth. This simple interpretation can maybe explain the success of the festivities linked to winter solstice that we find in several cultures throughout the world.

When Romans recycled pagan dances they were reinventing the wheel. And after them the Christians did the same. Joining fetishes representing Christ and the virginity of Mary to the pagan dances, they were actually connecting to much more ancient myths and customs. The Madonna with Child is indeed not a Christian heritage.

In Egypt, for instance, 2000 years before Jesus birth the god Horus (the Sun) was portrayed as a child in the arms of the goddess Isis (the Moon) who was a mother and sister. Even before that in Persi the myth of the god Mitra should make us think: it seems that he had been given birth by a virgin, he had twelve disciples and above all he was called The Savior! The Babylonian sun god TAMMUZ is not less surprising: he was also portrayed in the arms of the mother goddess ISHTAR, he had a halo made of twelve stars, representing the twelve zodiac signs. (12 like Christ’s disciples, don’t you think?) It seems that he also died and resuscitated after 3 days… and this in 3000 B.C.

I won’t talk about the horrid Dionysian rites, where a child god was literally cut into pieces by women who had gone insane, to be born again more beautiful and strong than before; and I just touch on a sun god in the Yucatan, he too was given birth by the virgin CHRIBIRIAS . But I would like to highlight that the rites that took place in the winter solstice were not present only in this hemisphere, but in the other one too, as even Incas celebrated the sun god WIRACOCHA on their winter solstice, that is on June 24th!

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PICTURE 1) Here is the extraordinary correspondence between the goddess Isis and the Christian Virgin. There are several similarities: we’re struck by the central role of the two figures in both the pagan and then Christian religion. They were both considered mortal, virgin and linked to the figure of the Savior, Horus for Isis and Christ for Mary, who were portrayed by classic iconography as the child held in the arms and breastfed by the woman.

So it’s the same the whole world over. And the whole world cheerfully celebrated a Christmas rich in dances and songs between a sexual intercourse and a drink, until Christianity came to upset the apple cart . It started of course to forbid the sex and the amenity of the festivity, that didn’t match Mary’s image of purity ; it was then the turn of the dance, considered a Devil’s gift . Finally pagan songs were substituted, as they still praised strange divinities of the past, mixing them with the Christian ones.

The first to provide an original text was, in 129 A.D., the Roman Bishop, who forced the believers to sing a HYMN OF THE ANGELS at Christmas; not to be outdone, the Orthodox Church, through a certain Comas from Jerusalem, created a HYMN TO THE DIVINITY in 720 A.D. Thereafter writing religious texts to sing at Christmas became a real profession reserved to the monks. The date of Jesus birth was fixed on December 25th in the 4th century to oppose the several winter solstice celebrations that still existed . Actually no Gospel refers to an exact date when it talks about the Nativity. Jesus was born and that’s all. Theologians got the idea from the census, letting pass that Romans had a real passion for the count of their subjects, often for planning and control reasons. Replacing the pagan festivities with the birth of Our Lord was therefore a brilliant master stroke.

Yet the people did not appreciate immediately this change: life was too short and hard to let one of the few moments of debauchery of the year be taken away. Condemned to the fast and to a sober lifestyle, the new Christians had found comfort in folk songs, that had the merit to be sung in the mother tongue, easy to understand and learn for everybody. The Church indeed forced the mob to learn Hymns in Latin by heart, and celebrations were led among sad and measured people that struggled to mumble words they did not understand.

Many early Christian bishops opposed this state of things, like St. Ambrose for instance, who even adapted the text VENI, REDEMPTOR GENTIUM to folk songs of pagan origins so that people, even though they didn’t know the text, could at least croon the song their own way. But these were isolated cases. With anathemas and threats of excommunication the Catholic Church managed to create a real musical anthology that was imposed on people and lasted until the Middle Ages. And for sure not for everybody’s joy. At the beginnings of 1200 people had lost the will to celebrate Christmas and the birth of our Lord passed by among apathetic families, whose only transgression was finally eating a piece of meat, after the long fasting of the Advent . One of the most attentive Saints and a reformer of the Catholicism, St. Francis of Assisi, realized it, and he thought of restoring the ancient cheerfulness to get the people closer to the Heaven.

Well understanding the difficulties of the poor people, he created a sort of living celebration of Christ’s birth, with a shed and characters that, differently from what is usually believed, did not stay there motionless, just to be admired, but used to sing traditional songs, that had never died, with flutes and bagpipes, telling shortly the story of the Nativity. It was a whole week of preparation for Christmas with games and competitions, as well as prize contests for the yearly staging of the best nativity scene . The highlight was on the December 25th, when joyful dances took place both in the open and, if weather did not permit it, inside the church, debunking the belief that the dances in honor of our Lord were sinful. It must be said that at first the Church did not like this innovation but Francis’ fame of holiness was so pure and uncontaminated that the Pope let it go, even because this joyful custom had arrived to France, Spain and Germany and it was such a publicity for the Christianity that forbidding it would have been like shooting himself in the foot.

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PICTURE 2. Francis took often part to the Christmas plays, placing in the middle of the night a newly born child in a crib and celebrating at the same time the Holy Mass. This way the mysteries of Jesus’ Birth and Mary’s Virginity were taught to ignorant people in a simple and effective way.

So, beside the church hymns that were strictly sung in Latin, in Europe Christmas began to be celebrated with carols in vernacular, that were more and more accurate and complex, spread around by minstrels and shepherds, who taught them to the people . The word CAROL, that indicates exactly the secular song linked to Christmas with dances and feasts, is French. We have no written proofs of the first Middle Ages popular carols, as they were spread orally and scholars did not transcribe them at all.

The oldest one we know comes from England, is dated 1470 and it’s the very first version of I SAW THREE SHIPS . England was the leader of the Christmas carols, with enthusiastic and well organized people that cranked out the first solo singers, called WAITS (i.e. those who wait). And they waited