Friday Jukebox: Carols for a Secular Sort of Saint Nicholas Day

Although the rest of the outfit got the day off I'm working today, so I have a computer to hand and, hence, you have this.

It is no secret that I am Hell-bound, and my "holiday music" tastes run to my unchurched bent. I enjoyed this simply because it's clever and melodic and still retains some vestigium of the "season".

Sadly, for me the season is colored by the grim anticipation of what is to come in the New Year; the ankommen an Macht of the Old Regime, the Return of the Oligarchs and their new dauphin, the Vulgar Aristocrat, the resurgence of the plutocratic, punitive Bourbons that I had thought were scourged for good from our politics in 1932.

And because this was a self-inflicted wound I cannot echo Ebenezer's nephew in his optimistic blessing of the holiday for what it symbolizes in human nature: (h/t to Pierce:)

"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

It seems to me more likely that this season belongs to a country, my country, that now belongs to a powerful minority that is trying to force it, and us, to shut its and our hearts to the least and lowest of our own, and I dread and fear what may happen if, and when, the sort of America that my grandparents knew, the America of the Gilded Age, the America that preceded the New Deal, is forced back upon us.

I am not by nature a happy man. That requires a belief in the justice of the world and the goodness of others and I have seen too much injustice to believe in the antithesis and I have little, if any, trust the goodness of humankind.

Still I try and look for happiness and hope. But more and more, on these, the longest nights of the year, I am drawn back to the old spare, sorrowful songs from the times we huddled against the cold and the dark unsure of whether the warmth and the light would ever return.

O sisters, too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day;
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
By-bye-lulee, lulay.

Herod the King, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day;
His men of might, in his own sight,
All children young, to slay.

Then woe is me, poor Child, for Thee,
And ever mourn and say;
For Thy parting, nor say nor sing,
By-bye-lulee, lulay.