Dec 5 – Not for kids only: Part 1

[Note: I recently noticed that people can easily download an mp3 of this music by clicking on the three dots to the right of the forward arrow on the big start button.  It works on my computer but as far as I can tell, mp3s won’t download to my iPad.   Also, technically each of these is a music podcast with (very long) cover text and pictures attached to it.  I don’t understand how podcasts work but knowing that might give some of you you a way to save the whole thing if you want. Or just go to my blog-archive anytime you want to hear or read them.]

This was the first commercially-made Christmas card, made in 1843. You can read about them here.

No playlist today; let the songs be a surprise

This is the first of four days in which my songs either come from children’s Christmas albums (or at least would be suitable for being on one), or express a childlike perspective of the world, or for any other reason that strike me as fitting into this series. But like the title says, I think that they can be enjoyed by adults as well as by kids.

Back when I was making my sampler CDs I used to put this kind of music together on samplers that I called “children’s albums for grownups.”  But truth be told, you might not notice much difference from some of the selections on poests that aren’t in this series. I think that I’m still pretty much a child at heart when it comes to my own taste in Christmas music.   

This first of the two songs in this set is the synth-pop duo Hive Riot’s modern update of a very old Christmas song.  Up on the Housetop was written in 1864 by the abolitionist, composer and United Brethren pastor Benjamin Hanby (1833-1867.) It is the oldest American secular Christmas song. (Wait, before you dispute my claim that this is the oldest secular American Christmas song, note that Jingle Bells, although written seven years earlier, was a pub song about (unchaperoned!) street racing with loose women that took place around American Thanksgiving. That song was certainly never intended to become associated with Christmas, let alone become thought of as a children’s song. Although now, it is true that it is Christmas song that every child learns to sing while still a pre-schooler. I stand by my claim.)

Hanby and his father, William Hanby who was a United Brethren bishop and one of the founders of Otterbein University, were both ardent abolitionists who ran refuges on the Underground Railway. Early in his career Benjamin wrote two anti-slavery parlour songs that were very popular before and during the Civil War - Darling Nelly Grey and Ole Shady.

Benjamin Hanby drawn from a photo by David Mankins image source

Although his real love was music, Benjamin initially followed in his father’s footsteps becoming a pastor. According to this biography:

Ben was appointed pastor of a United Brethren church in the small town of Lewisburg in western Ohio in 1862. By this time he had composed many songs and hymns and worked part-time for a music publisher in Cincinnati. He made his church bright and cheerful with his music. The children and young people were attracted and filled the church every week. He was not so popular with some of the older and more conservative members who thought that musical instruments were "tools-of the devil"! Opposition to instrumental music in churches was not unusual for that day. The year before, the United Brethren General Conference prohibited the use of choirs in their churches and later extended that to include instrumental music. The criticism continued until Ben was forced to resign.

When another pastoral appointment was rescinded for the same reason, Benjamin game up the ministry and opened a singing school in New Paris, Ohio. It became known in the community as the Singing Church. That did not prove to be very lucrative for him and his now-growing family. His music publisher saw an opportunity and hired Hanby to take his music “on the road” touring in the style of the popular camp meetings and travelling singing schools of those times. He also organized touring children’s concerts - a novelty in those days.

Hanby’s touring schools and shows proved to be very successful but we will never know how he might have gone on to influence the trajectory of popular culture. In 1867, at the age of 33, Benjamin Hanby died of tuberculosis.

I don’t have to tell you that many of the songs that we associate with Christmas were written to be children’s sing-along songs, especially if like me you grew up early in the early post-WWII baby boom generation.  A large portion of the Christmas music repertoire are children’s songs, and Santa Claus and his retinue are the dominant characters in them. The story behind why that is is long and complicated. The following block-quote text is largely a rewrite of the cultural-context information from my Dec 3, 2021 essay about the modern history of celebrating Hanukkah. (Info about the songs continues after this socio-cultural history lesson.)

The birth of Jesus is only scantily covered in the New Testament and the date of that birth is not given. When Christianity was expanding during the dying days of the Roman Empire, Church authorities chose December 25 as the official date for celebrating Christ’s birth.

December 25 had been known as Sol Invictus (which was the peak day in the six day Saturnalia festivities, and was also considered the birth day of the then-popular Mithras, the Persian god of the sun. That was the day that Church officials declared to also be Christ’s birthday. That decision allowed the recently-converted Roman Christians to continue their strongly-entrenched joyous midwinter traditions unabated, but with an official new meaning for the day.  

One reason for the Church’s being motivated to select a birth date for Christ was that they wanted to draw attention to his birth because of an internal Catholic dispute about Jesus’ nature:  Was he God, human, or both?  For the Catholic Church the only theologically-correct answer was that He was both.  So highlighting a miraculous birth account that was in the New Testament books of Matthew and Luke undercut heretics who advocated that he was not human.

Church officials continued this approach centuries later in early medieval times when they set out to Christianize the Celtic and other Northern European pagans.  Ancient midwinter goddess-worship celebrations took place around the time of the winter solstice, celebrating the conception of the upcoming Spring. As with the Romans, the December 25 date assigned for Jesus’ birth allowed the traditional forms of midwinter celebration to be continued, but with Mary taking the place of the Mother Goddess.

This celebration of Christmas really got a boost in medieval times when the converts began a cult in devotion (officially, it can not be called worship!) to Jesus’ mother since nothing can show how close she was to her Divine Son than the story of when she gave birth to him. The medieval Marian cult and this increased importance for Christmas, was not led by Church officials - it was a populist movement that they could not suppress. An indication of their surrender to popular demand occurred in 1163 AD with the naming of Christendom’ newest and largest cathedral Notre Dame de Paris.

That is how celebrating Christmas began to overshadow Easter in people’s hearts as the most meaningful religious holiday of the year (as, I would argue, it is still perceived today by all but the most theologically-minded.)

But the holiday suffered a severe setback in English-speaking countries after Puritan hardliners won the English Civil War.  Oliver Cromwell and other Reformation leaders were well aware that the holiday was based more on pagan than biblical origins, and took the not-unreasonable viewpoint that if God wanted the birthday of Jesus to be celebrated He would have included the date in His bible. 

In 1647, the English Parliament banned not just the religious celebration of Christmas but any observation of the day at all.  Businesses were not allowed to close on that day, and churches could not hold services, unless it occurred on a Sunday.  Puritans in New England enacted a similar ban in 1659.

This proved to be an “own goal” (as they say in soccer) by the Puritan hardliners.  They should have learned the lesson from the Roman Empire and the early Catholic Church – don’t try to extinguish popular culture by government or church fiat.  When the prohibitions were enacted many devout people went along with it, but others resisted. 

During the official bans, and for several years after they were repealed, many good, law-abiding people did indeed quietly go about their usual daily business on Christmas and throughout the traditional 12 day Christmastide (formerly known as Yuletide) season. They did not attribute any special meaning, religious or otherwise, to the day. They also discontinued the old secular customs that had been associated with Christmastide, including those that had promoted community-mindedness, generosity to the poor, and joyfulness. 

But for many others, the old customs from the pagan core of the holiday season continued to be widely celebrated, both by usually law-abiding people who did not want to abandon the old customs, and especially by a rising generations of young ne’er-do-wells who had grown up suspicious of religious and governmental leadership.

The laws became unenforceable and eventually were rescinded, but the damage had been done. Christmas Day and the old Christmas season had become devoid of both religious meaning and a moral compass.  Over the next century or so the idea of celebrating Christmas came to be associated with widespread boisterous drunkenness and loutish, licentious behavior.   Most law-abiding people weren`t into that, so they continued to not celebrate at all.

By the early 19th century, in both England and English-speaking North America, people decided that something must be done to tone down the rowdy midwinter misbehaving and return the holiday to having a moral purpose.  The “Keep Christmas” movement was born and began to blossom on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.  As far as I can tell, the movement didn’t really have any central organization, but it did have prominent public leaders on both sides of the pond who shared a vision of what kind of holiday they wanted Christmas to be. 

No one wanted to return to the bad old days of religious intolerance and divisiveness, so Christmas was to have a flexible but religious core consistent with whatever kind of Christianity individuals practiced.  The celebrations were to be focused on temperate home-life, with particular attention paid to making the occasion attractive for children. That included re-establishing old customs, like festive seasonal decorations in the home, giving Christmas gifts, and helping the poor. The focus on making it a special occasion for children was so that a new generation would grow up with a new morally-upright model for celebrating the holiday, that would then become perpetuated. 

Image taken from the first photo ever released of the Royal Family, intended to demonstrate their support for the Keep Christmas movement. image source

In England, the most prominent promoters of the Keep Christmas movement included Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In 1840 they allowed a rare image of their private lives to be published, with their children celebrating around a Christmas tree, a custom that Albert brought with him from Germany. In 1843 Charles Dickens published his famous novella A Christmas Carol, in which the notorious miser and party-pooper Ebenezer Scrooge is won over to the keeping of Christmas.

In America prominent Christmas-keeping role models included the presidents and their families, but as in England the movement’s most effective rout was through literature and music.  In fact, Americans were the first off the mark with Christmas literature: Well before Dickens wrote his family-friendly Christmas ghost story, in the early 1800s Washington Irving published several stories about Christmas customs in the early days when New York was a Dutch settlement, and later supposedly factual (but largely fictional) accounts about well-to-do families in England joyously celebrating Christmas in years past.   

That is also when children’s literature and professionally-composed children’s songs were born: Publishers began releasing special Christmas books and magazine subscriptions for children, and periodicals for adults began including Christmas poems in their December issues to be read to children on and before the day.

Perhaps the most influential piece of Christmas literature of all was one such children’s poem written by a politically conservative New York Episcopal bishop who was also a professor at the General Theological Seminary. He had written it to read to his own children and their friends. The bishop/professor was Clement Clark Moore, and the poem was called A Visit from St. Nicholas.  It is now commonly known as The Night Before Christmas.

The children’s response to the poem was very positive and Moore’s adult friends encouraged him to allow it to be published. In 1823 he agreed but was worried that being known as the author of a frivolous children’s poem would jeopardize his professional reputation he insisted that it be published anonymously (which was quite common at the time.) As we would now say, the poem “went viral.” It was re-published in newspapers throughout the US and instantly became popular nation-wide. It was only after considerable family pressure to take credit for it that in 1837 Moore acknowledged that he was the one who had written it.

In the meantime, the Keep Christmas movement was quickly gaining momentum, both in England and in America.  New family-based traditions were burgeoning and succeeding in their objective. Children raised with the new customs were passing them along to their friends’ families, and nearly everyone then passed this new way to celebrate Christmas along to the next generations.  But the American seed of a legendary gift-bringer planted by Prof Moore was also beginning to bear fruit. 

Moore’s “jolly old elf” benefactor evolved into Santa Claus and became something of an irresistible cultural phenomenon.  Whole new sectors of children’s literature, game- and toy-making developed, and were aggressively marketed. By the 1860s the newly invented department stores were already beginning to use the character of Santa Claus as a marketing tool.  The concepts of children being able to talk to him in the stores to tell him what they wanted, and seasonal window displays of gifts, were invented. Our modern concept of Christmas had begun.

Skipping ahead, we all know now that the Keep Christmas movement had a more powerful impact than its founders could ever have imagined. But in fact, like the Puritans before them, their huge success has been marked by unintended consequences: It has made the main focus of Christmas for many people the pressure for lavish-gift-giving and unparalleled commercial excess.  

That 19th century burgeoning of Christmas commercialism is the time when Up on the Housetop was written, as well as another Christmas song that Hanby wrote that is still sung called Jolly Old Saint Nicholas.  Those two songs helped to flesh out our current image of Santa Claus and how he goes about his gift-distribution role.

Hive Riot (Mindy and Dustin Gledhill)     photo source

It is against that backdrop that Hive Riot has reworked the lyrics to Benjamin Hanby’s classic Up on the Housetop to depict a much less commercialized, more values-centred, and less gender-stereotyped vision for the holiday gifts. When I was young (and even now) the idea of different toys for the boy and girl did not seem at all odd. It seemed like a reflection of the reality of me, my siblings and all our friends, that little boys and girls often have different interests.

I can’t remember when I was young of any boys having an interest in dolls, or any girls who would have wanted a ball (except those little rubber ones used for playing jacks) or the bull whip that I got one Christmas (that could make a loud cracking sound if used right.) But some toys were not gender-specific: We all wanted and got cap pistols so we could shoot each other while playing “cowboys and Indians” (but none of us played at being Indians; all of us little cowboys and cowgirls would shoot each other indiscriminately.)

The now-disbanded Hive Riot was comprised of Mindy Gledhill and her brother-in-law Dustin Gledhill. The song was recorded in 2015 especially for a music sampler album called Merry Christmas, Provo! (vol. 2), published by the City of Provo, Utah. The album was part of a charitable fund-raising project that lasted for five years in which in 100% of the albums’ sales went to the local United Fund’s annual Sub for Santa program.

A screen-shot from the Oh, Santa! song segment of The Toy That Saved Christmas. You can watch the segment by clicking on the above picture.

The song Oh, Santa! comes from the The Toy That Saved Christmas episode of the VegieTales series of animated Christian bible stories and morality lessons for children.

You can watch the segment by clicking here or on the above picture. Actually though, the song itself tells the story quite well. There are a few items that don’t make sense without the visuals. For example, it is helpful to know that this is a play being performed by VeggieTales’ regular vegetable characters, and all of them remain on stage in the living room after their duets with Larry.  Knowing that helps to explain a discovery that Santa makes near the end of their little show, and that Santa Claus’ final comments are being made to the bank robber and the Viking, not to Larry (who is a good cucumber) after Santa sees that they are in possession of the stolen items.

Also, when Larry gets tired of rapacious intruders he slams the door on one of them. That lead to a little surprise at the end that you can discover by watching the video. But, like a young child needs to do so frequently, you can just accept that you don’t understand everything that is going on around you and enjoy the story’s unfolding and Larry’s cheerful outlook on life.

This was the fifth episode in the VeggieTales long-lived series and was released direct to VHS/DVD in 1996.  The songwriters and main singers are Mike Nawrocki and Phil Vischer, the founders and operators of Big Idea Entertainment, the production company that made the shows.

VeggieTales in general is much harder for me to explain than Up on the Housetop, especially since I have no other experience with that series.  Researching it was confusing because the show has gone through at least three iterations, under the names VeggieTales, Veggie Tales, and The VeggieTales Show, involving different distribution vehicles and content policies.  Fortunately, I have an easy cop-out:  I can just refer you to the entry for this song on the Big Idea Wiki, an officially-sanctioned fan-club information source about all things VeggieTales, or the series’ Wikipedia entry, and let you see if you can figure it out for yourself.

One aspect of looking into this song was quite disturbing for me. The process involved repeated viewing of the YouTube video. I don’t subscribe to YouTube, but many parents of you children do if they can afford it so that their children won’t be exposed to the advertisements. This video was constantly preceded by hard-sell toy advertisements that were clearly aimed at children, of the type that are no longer allowed on television.

It would therefore be children in financially less well-off families that would mostly be the targets for this intrusive advertising. This was a constant reminder to me that Christmas remains a highly commercialized business for toy-makers, just as it was when their industry was kick-started in the early 19th century by the Keep Christmas movement. But that is not a knock against this VeggieTales video, which is delightful, or the Christian values of the people who made it.