Holy, Holy, Etc.
My mother’s many gifts couldn’t fit on Santa’s sleigh. Among them are songwriting and an ability to effortlessly win the adoration of small children, both of which she employed in writing and directing original Christmas pageants at our small Evangelical church. She has passed onto me her passion for songwriting, as well as a delicious holiday monkey bread recipe we make every Christmas eve. It was while making that annual monkey bread together this year that we found ourselves in disagreement over a new tradition: my Christmas playlist.
Created three years ago during our last Christmas together, my playlist covers the entire sad/happy spectrum of Christmas songs, from reverent liturgical hymns to obscure English carols to modern classics by Bing Crosby, Mariah Carey, and members of the Rat Pack. It is, in my humble opinion, perfect. I have played it religiously every December since in memory of our last Christmas together.
However, this is the first December I have spent with my parents since founding this new tradition, and my mother is not a fan. When an admittedly melancholic choir performance of a Latin hymn was immediately chased with a Sufjan song, my mother took a break from her monkey bread making to finally voice her displeasure with Mr. Stevens’ songwriting:
“Well, your mother is depressed, now.”
Perhaps my sad/happy balance was off-kilter. I would argue this is not Sufjan’s fault: Songs For Christmas features a number of joyous, one-minute instrumental covers of Christmas tunes as well as Sufjan’s achingly beautiful arrangement of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” its penultimate track. But “Holy Holy Etc.” is neither of these things. This 41-second track (really, 32 seconds followed by a long silence) is little more than a harmony guitar part interrupted by off-putting laughter. So what is it doing here?
Honestly, I have no idea. The hymn the track is riffing on is not even a Christmas song, strictly speaking. Anglican bishop Reginald Heber wrote “Holy, Holy, Holy” in the early 19th century as a hymn for Trinity Sunday, a spring holiday, to the tune of an earlier song which was also about the doctrine of the Trinity. So what we have inherited is, apparently, an aborted arrangement of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” a track which is itself lifted from an earlier song, neither of which is about Christmas.
Stevens is famously Christian. It’s what made him “safe” listening when I was a teenager struggling with the confines of Evangelicalism. But Stevens’ faith, like Heber’s, is inextricable from playfulness and creativity. In fact, Stevens is a member of the same Anglican Communion that Reginald Heber was a bishop in. During his lifetime, the Anglican Church was about as receptive of Heber’s songwriting as my mother is of Sufjan’s; Heber’s hymns were not permitted to be sung in church for being too informal and playful. Today, though, “Holy, Holy, Holy” is a beloved Anglican hymn that has been covered by countless artists as a Christmas song because, really, how many other old hymns do people still know nowadays?
In a 2012 interview with Uncut, Sufjan laid down his philosophy of Christmas songwriting:
“The elusive Christmas hit usually has an indelible melody, clever wordplay, and juxtaposition of conflicting consciousness: joy and heartache, or sacred and profane. Christmas is a Catch-22. We celebrate “God made man” with luxurious feasts and revelry in the dead of winter when nature is least inviting. The best Christmas songs (even the secular ones) tap into this bi-polar emotional field.”
Like many who leave their childhood faiths behind, I find Christmas to be at once nostalgic and profoundly painful in ways I cannot describe. It’s like your ex is having a birthday party and they’ve invited your entire family. You go, you even have a bit of fun, but there is an unspoken weirdness to the whole evening. Sufjan speaks that weirdness and, when words fail, arranges it to be played by a couple of guitars and an ethereal laugh.
But every Advent needs its Christmas, every yin its Auld Lang Syne. Cheery, tinsley, secular holiday tunes are every bit as valid as the dour ones. “Silver Bells,” “Santa Baby,” and “Let It Snow” are as Christmassy as monkey bread and as Jewish as Baby Jesus: the holiday pull-apart known to us today as golden dumpling coffee cake or monkey bread traces its roots to a Hungarian Jewish pastry called Aranygaluska, and the aforementioned songs were written by Jewish songwriters. They have snuck into the Christmas canon by the same route as “Holy, Holy, Holy” — they bring us joy.
After a bit of grumbling, I added some Nat King Cole to the playlist to rebalance its vibe, and Mother and Child finished making the monkey bread together in heavenly peace. It turned out, in our humble opinions, perfect.
Keith Schnabel is a producer of activist films. Their upcoming documentary on the legacy of mental asylums can be previewed here.