Parish Mag, December

Valiant readers in such far-away place as Hamilton (Scotland, not Bermuda) and Valparaiso (a parish a bit west of Betwys-y-Coed) are always complaining that our parish mag doesn't always reach them, and remind me that this blog was started to accommodate the stuff that tickled them under the kilt (or poncho) but which my (highly esteemed) editor frequently sees fit to spike, even though many parishioners claim it is only thing which helps them survive four sermons. (Well, OK then, two parishioners, but it's a start.)

Amazingly, this piece made it into the December mag, while other far more worthy pieces didn't.

By the time you read this I am going to be heartily sick of Christmas carols, or at least the sort of stuff that shops start blaring out at you from about the week after Easter. In fact the sooner someone invents a carol-cancelling ear-muff for shoppers the better, as far as I am concerned.

The reason you become a grumpy old git is that you’ve been around long enough for things to get on your wick, like for instance greengrocers apostrophe’s, income tax returns, anything to do with the NHS, the adulation of blokes who kick balls round fields for a living, and, worst of all, syrupy versions of Little perishing Donkey blasted out of tinny speakers in shop doorways when you are unfortunate enough to have had to to nip out to purchase a seasonal cabbage or something for your tea.

It is therefore always a joy (to this GOG, anyway) to discover a carol you haven’t already heard and sung 93 trillion times before, and so I have made it my life’s work to track down those elusive carols, or at least carols unknown in the English-speaking world, which don’t ever use the words Wenceslas, Herald, or Figgy Pudding.

The carols of a nation tell you something about the national character. Austrian carols sound like an oompah band. Scandinavian carols are extremely serious and can give you frostbite. French carols are un peu gamin and flirty, and I imagine carols as a genre are frooned on a wee bittie in the Ooter Hebrides. Heaven only knows if they have carols in Wales, but if they do they’ll be written in the style of Handel for a choir of a thousand (and there’ll be lots of repeats.)

My favourites, actually, are Polish carols. We sing one in England, Infant Holy, although the original is even more ambiguous about where the musical stresses should be, and the better for it.

In choirs in England we’re quite used to new harmonisations of traditional carols, and the melody is always left strictly alone. But the curious thing about Polish carols is that the tune is often changed as well as the harmony, though the essential character of every koleda is always retained. A friend at the University of Warsaw, who was very knowledgeable about the old language still used in the texts of some traditional Polish carols, warned me that these texts are pretty much untranslatable. They also use a couple of characters from old Church Slavonic which don’t appear in the fonts your home computer comes equipped with (even in Poland), so preparing performing editions for an English choir was a nightmare, but between us we did it. Two carols made their English debut at a service in West Yorkshire in 199-something, and I thought the choir made a pretty good job of the phonetic language Anna and I had worked out between us. A Polish lady in the congregation was greatly moved by the music of her familiar old carols. But she thought the choir had sung them in Welsh.

Oh, and but. As well as having the best carols in the world, Poland has the best strawberries. Or so lovely Anna says, in her impeccable English.