Christmas carols played repleatedly in our home during December when I was little. We had three albums of carols and I would stack the wax records up on the spindle of the record player so they would drop automatically at the end of one side of the disc. I don’t think we ever had more than three albums. If my parents ever possessed tapes of Christmas music, it was after I’d left the house. Money was always tight when I was growing up and music was not something my parents spent money on. My favorite carol is “I Heard the Bells.” The version I heard most often was sung by Frank Sinatra on an album that had Christmas songs sung by Bing Crosby and him.

I remember the exact moment when I decided this carol was my favorite. I must have been 9 years old. It doesn’t seem that I could have been younger than that and I certainly wasn’t any older, because we were living in Tennessee and by the time I was 10 we had moved to South Carolina.

We lived in Johnson City which is near the Appalachian mountains. For some reason, we’d had to drive into the mountains although I don’t remember for what. Mom was driving. Dad wasn’t with us – probably at work. I was sitting way in the back of the station wagon. I wasn’t in a seat or the seat was folded down; this was long before there were child safety seats or even a thought that everyone in the car should be buckled up. I guess one of my brothers was in the passenger seat in front and the other was probably in the middle row of seats. Actually, we may have been separated into those sitting arrangements by my mother. I’m afraid the three of us tended to squabble in the car and we were always worse when my dad wasn’t around.

It had started snowing and we were traveling on a winding, two lane road. Mom was tense. It was a light fog and a light snow, but the roads were slick. She’d asked us all to be quiet. I’d asked her to turn on the radio and she did although reception in the mountains was poor. In the back of the station wagon where I was seated, the side of the vehicle had a bump out where the speaker was located. I rested my arms and head on it, ear right over the speaker. The station was playing Christmas tunes and I was singing along with them in my head. I had to strain sometimes to hear the music through the static. Maybe this is what made me pay such close attention to the lyrics, but when I heard “I Heard the Bells,” I thought “This is a really sad song.”

I dwelled on this revelation for a while because weren’t Christmas songs supposed to be happy? Wasn’t Christmas a celebration? I remember asking my mom about the carol. I thought maybe I didn’t understand, that there was something I was missing about it. I don’t remember the exact conversation, but she did confirm that the lyrics were sad at the beginning but at the end, there’s hope because the lyrics show that God is always in control and thinking of his children (or something along those lines – we were a religious family.)

There’s something about the utter despair, the melancholy, in the first verses that draws me to this song, this poem. The world is happy, joyous, celebrating, bells pealing, but the person in the poem is desolate, this world has rejected him from the communion of celebration, he mourns and the pealing bells mock his grief. I wasn’t a sad child and I’m not a sad adult, but the song has always moved me. That lonely, untended, shunned part of me resonates with those lyrics; it understands an internal sadness that’s too deep for bitterness. Maybe it’s human to carry some personal sadness within ourselves. Maybe all humans have this, even children, and the ownership of personal grief, “secret sorrows” to quote Longfellow in another poem, is part of what makes us human.

Of course the poem does end with a few hopeful lines, but the suggestion of comfort and hope is insufficient for the utter emptiness expressed by the prior verses. The despair is not fully vanquished, no matter how richly the words are sung or with what gusto the music swells at the end of the song. So this carol returns, year after year, to give voice to the baneful sadness isolating me, you, all of us even as we join together in a spirit of celebration.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Christmas Bells

I HEARD the bells on Christmas Day

Their old, familiar carols play,

And wild and sweet

The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,

The belfries of all Christendom

Had rolled along

The unbroken song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,

The world revolved from night to day,

A voice, a chime,

A chant sublime

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth

The cannon thundered in the South,

And with the sound

The carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent

The hearth-stones of a continent,

And made forlorn

The households born

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;

“There is no peace on earth,” I said;

“For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.”