God Bless You and Send You a Happy New Year

While it is true that today is the beginning of a new year, and that I welcomed in 2020 with the customary Pipes At Midnight (in this case, playing a long medley all in one go: Canzone de Zampognari (twice through), Adeste Fideles (also twice through), Scotland the Brave, The Minstrel Boy, and Auld Lang Syne (twice through seemed a good thing for the traditional New Year's tune, so twice through it was.) followed by a long toast in which I faced the Crucifix and saluted Our Lord, drawing on Jacobite traditions and Tolkien, and mentioning Friendship, Truth, Beauty, and All Good Things, before downing a lovely whisky in a quiet house, lit only by the Christmas tree and various candles..... you are not going to get a post that reflects that New Year tradition, nor even a wassail song. (Look at me getting halfway through the Long Christmas without a wassail yet!). Instead you are getting an odd little carol which seems fitting to the other commemoration of this Holy Day of Obligation, the Circumcision of Our Lord. 

I know that it can seem strange to non-Catholics to celebrate such a feast day, but we do it for two reason. The first is that it marks the first occasion in which Our Lord shed blood for us. So great is the Majesty of God, that this small suffering would have been more than enough to save the world from sin. This should be a comfort for those of us who sometimes think that we have committed a sin too great for God to forgive-- or that we are just plain too sinful (without being particularly ostentatious in our wickedness) for His forgiveness. God is so great that a single drop of His blood is more than enough to wipe out the sins of the entire world, from its Fall to its End: how then, can any or our own personal sins, become so great that He cannot forgive them? Granted, His Love could not be satisfied by a small suffering, but insisted in pouring Itself out until It was utterly spent and there was nothing else to give, but that is because His is Love, and True Love, in God as in Man, is foolish in Its need to show Itself to the Beloved. The bare fact of the matter is that our Redemption was accomplished by the mere fact of God becoming Man entirely, and this first of His sufferings for us, had in it all that was necessary for our salvation. This is, indeed, a thing well worth celebrating! 

The second reason is that it was on this day that Our Lord was officially given His name: Jesus, that is to say, Saviour. In taking the name, on this day, which the Angel had given Him at the time of His conception, He was announcing the purpose for which He had come into the world. He was, in a very real way, taking up His mission, and all the pain and suffering that went with it, by the taking of His name-- again, a thing well worth celebrating!

So, the carol you are getting today, seems appropriate to this feast day in which the shadow of the Cross first peaks into the Nativity narrative. It is a variation on the Corpus Christi Carol, which I have posted here a couple times before. This version, however, is specifically meant for Christmas-- and, indeed, there are actually two lyrical version of this as a Christmas carol. The version I have chosen to give you strikes me as the more Christmassy of the two, though this particular arrangement of this particular version is lighter and more delicate than almost every other version I have found of it. (The music that goes with this particular variant tends to be rather dark, and while I like it very much indeed, it seems weirdly aggressive for my purposes.)