*Complete results of joeallotta.com staff was:
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing 1 vote
All other Christmas songs 0 votes
As you can see, the vote wasn’t even close. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing is the greatest Christmas song ever written. It had some serious contenders though. All I Want for Christmas Is You is the most played Christmas song of all time on the radio (and in the top 20 of all songs ever.) White Christmas is the best-selling single of all time (not just Christmas). Silent Night is the most recorded song in the history of the world (literally thousands of recordings in numerous languages.) And Jingle Bells, Batman Smells is the most sung Christmas song never actually recorded anywhere. Its origins can be traced back to kids on the US Naval base in San Diego in the Christmas of 1966 (soon after Adam West’s Batman premiered) and started spreading throughout the world partly due to the Vietnam War.) Although, it was sung by Bart on the very first episode of the Simpsons, and by Joker himself on Batman the Animated Series as he escapes Arkham Asylum. So why did the illustrious staff pick Hark! The Herald Angels Sing as the best? 3 reasons, great writers, great lyrics, and great music.
1) Great Writers
The carol first appeared in John Wesley’s book Hymns and Sacred Poems published in 1739, although this particular Christmas day hymn was written by his brother Charles Wesley. Originally, it was titled Hark How All the Welkin Rings (welkin being an Old English word referencing Heaven.) But, you’ll hear in a second how that was changed. Chuck (as no one but me calls him) wrote numerous hymns you’d recognize, and he and his brother John were founders of methodist movement and ultimately the Methodist church. In the early days they worked with another giant of the Great Awakening, George Whitefield. There was some diversity of thought in those early days. Whitefield and his crew were pretty staunch Calvinists, while the Wesleys and their posse were Arminian. They had lots of fun debates, but ultimately George Whitefield decided to focus on evangelism, and he controversially turned over his leadership to John Wesley with his “wing” of the church fully taking over the theological direction. And while they still shot some barbs at each other from time to time, they knew they were both building the kingdom of God in their own way. Whitefield was one of the greatest evangelists in English and American history (well we weren’t actually America yet, just a bunch of cantankerous colonists). And we can thank him and Jonathan Edwards for contributing to the Christian foundation of this country. Whitefield drew HUGE crowds. He knew how to deliver emotionally impactful sermons, and it was just so different from the preaching of the day. Ben Franklin had heard of him but thought the crowds that gathered was just hyperbole. So, when Whitefield was in Philadelphia, Franklin made sure to see him. He estimated 30,000 people gathered in the square, and that people 100 paces away could hear this little, cross-eyed preacher with no problem. (Even TSwift would have trouble singing to that many people with no sound system!) I say all this to explain that George Whitefield read Wesley’s Christmas hymn and knew it would be a hit he could use in his revivals. He tweaked the first line to Hark! The Harold Angels Sing because he knew us Americans didn’t know what a welkin was. He also thought it better tied into the Christmas story of the angels announcing the birth of Jesus in Luke 2 which I suppose is most important.
2) Great Lyrics
Of this there is no debate. The words of this Christmas carol are Toit! (Toit being a New English word “a stylized way of saying ‘tight,’ meaning cool, excellent, or great,” popularized by law enforcement officer Jake Peralta. Similar to “noice,” popularized by Key & Peele.) While I love all the lyrics, I’ll focus on 3 of my favorites.
- “Peace on earth, and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled!”
I love this line because it explains what the angels meant when they said Jesus would bring peace on earth. He is going to reunite sinful man with a merciful God. That reconciliation is the peace being talked about.
- “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity, pleased with us in flesh to dwell, Jesus, our Immanuel.”
Ahhhh. That’s so good!!! Christmas is the celebration of the incarnation, i.e. that God became a human being. He came to save human beings, so He had to become a human being. This vague promise in Isaiah of a child being born that would be called “God with Us” is realized in that 8lb 6oz baby Jesus who is literally the Creator of the Universe dwelling with His creation.
- “Mild he lays his glory by, born that we no more may die, born to raise us from the earth, born to give us second birth.”
I guess Wesley or Whitefield couldn’t rhyme the word kenosis with anything. This is the point that Judaism and Islam struggles with so much. How can God become a man? It seems impossible? But I like to simply say, Is God powerful enough to become a human if He wanted to? The answer is, Yes! He can do anything. I don’t like phrasing it as setting aside His divinity in any way. I like to say He added the limitations of humanity. Humans are in one place at a time. Humans are conceived, born, and die. So the God of the universe became a human with all those limitations. Such limitations allowed Him to come into the world, allowed Him to die for our sins, allowed Him to rise from the dead, and allowed Him to welcome us into His kingdom.
3) Great Music
So many hymns of the church had different music over the years. I guess some churches just sang hymns like Buddy the Elf. “I’m in a church, I’m in a church and I’m singing. I’m in a church and I’m singing!” Or many hymns reworked music from bar songs. But fortunately Hark! The Herald Angels Sing doesn’t use the tune of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. But the music was reworked from another song. The great Felix Mendelssohn originally wrote the music for a cantata about Guttenberg’s printing press. (Does that sound boring? Well does a stage musical about the first US Treasury Secretary now on the $10 bill sound boring? Yeah, that’s what I thought!) Then, in 1855, a random church organist took that hoppin’ Mendelssohn music and put it to the lyrics of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. The Anglicans went gaga over this song. By 1885, 51 of the 52 Anglican hymn books had the song in it. Now, you can’t find a hymn book without it. Go on, find me a hymn book without Hark! The Herald Angels Sing! What I personally like about the song is that you kind of have to yell it. No one has described me as a “good singer” per say. I think O, Holy Night is beautiful but normal people can’t sing it well. Your voice either cracks or has to go falsetto. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing is right in the sweet spot. I can sing it, and we all get to yell it to the Lord. It’s just perfect.
Thus, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing is the greatest Christmas carol of all time.
Joe Allotta 