This is one of our older Christmas carols, On This Day Earth Shall Ring: lyrics published in 1582, and the melody has been traced by into the 1300s in Finland. Performed here by St. Malachy’s College Choir, Belfast.
Turn up the volume and open the window–this poor world needs Christmas!
Beauty Beyond Bones is a blog I follow regularly: nice Catholic girl. And what she had to say yesterday is very important. It only took her one sentence to make the point clear:
“It’s time to open the door and let Christmas out.”
Bullseye! Bingo! Hit the nail on the head! So absolutely of course I reblogged it.
Before she made her point, she told a rather hair-raising story of a ghastly experience in church that must have scared her but good. That experience shows what kind of age we live in.
The rulers of the darkness of this world are doing everything they can to wipe out Christmas, or, even better from their point of view, pervert it. We mustn’t let them do it!
Erlene called for this one–O Holy Night, sung by Josh Groban–and it’s just beautiful. Open a window and turn up the volume. The world needs to hear God’s message of salvation.
The clips are from a film called The Nativity Story.
Like another song says, Go tell it on the mountain–that Jesus Christ is born!
This high-spirited performance of Ding-Dong Merrily on High is by the Idaho Falls Symphony Orchestra with the combined choirs of the area high schools–well worth turning up the volume!
I keep looking for a rendition of this hymn with a harpsichord solo, but haven’t found one yet.
Hey, everybody! Let’s sing this Christmas in with a bang! I’m waiting for your Christmas hymn requests.
Thanks to “jessicafischerqueen” for providing us with this, Requieum: In Paradisum, by Gabriel Faure.
Composed for use in the Catholic funeral mass between 1887 and 1890, Faure continued to revise it, finishing at last in 1900. He intended it to console the bereaved with a sense of eternal rest in Paradise.
Our friend “theWhiteRabbit” asked for The Little Drummer Boy. I hope you like this performance of it by Celtic Woman.
Do you believe this? God looked down on the world and saw it was just as cruel, just as bad, as in the days of Noah. The strong prey on the weak, lies prey on truth, and the cry of it goes all the way up to Heaven. How can God heal it?
He sends a baby. Born in a manger, because there was no room at the inn.
Told you Christianity is wild!
This comes to us from our esteemed colleague “jessicafischerqueen,” by way of my chess page.
Here two masters in two different art forms–Bach for classical music, Pasolini for film–come together to create one masterpiece glorifying Our Lord Jesus Christ. The film is The Gospel According to St. Matthew. The music is Erbarme dich mein Gott. I am posting it here before some diversity fanatic finds a way to ban it.
I love this carol. Yeah, I know, it’s getting so I say that about all of them. Well, I can’t help it.
Pat-a-Pan is an ancient Burgundian Christmas carol, sung here by the Zamar Student Choir from the Harrisburg Baptist Church in Mississippi. It might not be the only Pat-a-Pan I post this season, but we shall see.
This gorgeous hymn, composed by St. Saens, sung here by Libera, is good for any time of the year. It’s like a clean wind from God, a mighty wind that blows away the darkness and the dirt. Turn up the volume!
As a sidelight, it was the basis for the theme music in the movie, Babe (the one about the pig)… which, oddly enough, is the second time this week that Babe has come up in relation to Christmas.
This is the theme music for the 1984 version of A Christmas Carol, starring George C. Scott as Scrooge. Nick Bicat composed the music, and the street scenes were shot in Shrewsbury, England. If you haven’t seen it, trust me, it’s wonderful.
The story itself is a reminded that God created us for good works–not to buy our way into Heaven, but to be vessels of God’s love, living testimony to His sanctifying power, and instruments of His goodness.