The Christmas and Advent art I find myself most attracted to is the bittersweet kind. In terms of hymns, the more obvious of these include songs such as “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” and “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” But for this post I would like to talk about a secular song, “Christmas Day,” by Dido. Given my prior posts, some of you may be surprised that I like this song; it is about an inexplicably broken promise of betrothal that was supposed to be fulfilled on Christmas day, and it concludes with the words:
And the last words
I heard him say
Were the last words
I ever
Heard him say
I shall return,
For you,
My love
On Christmas Day
On a surface reading, one might presume that this song is a veiled allegorical critique suggesting that God has failed to fulfill his promises to humans. I don’t know if this is what the writer intended, but, regardless, I think there is a different way of reading it. Part of recognizing the hope of God’s promise very often begins with the recognition that all other promises fail, and His is the only one we can turn to; I think not only of Ecclesiastes, but also of The Wanderer, an Old English poem that uses the failure of earthly things to pique the speaker’s desire for heaven. And the Christmas story is full of broken promises; it implicitly contrasts the holy peace brought by Christ with the more duplicitous Augustan “Pax” Romana. Even closer to the heart of the Biblical story, we encounter an Israel so corrupt that Mary, Joseph, and the baby have to flee to Egypt for safety — fleeing from the promised land to Egypt is a reversal of the Exodus story, a testament to Israel’s failure to keep the Old Testament covenant. So the wonder of God’s promise is made all the more poignant against the backdrop of so many broken human covenants, and it is perfectly appropriate to acknowledge such broken covenants in Christmas songs like Dido’s — or, for that matter, the old medieval carol with which we open Advent, “Adam lay ybounden.”
For the next 23 days, I will be posting reflections on Christmas and Christmas culture as a way of counting down Advent. My posts will orbit about two themes: the primary reason for Christmas, the coming of Immanuel (God with us); and the odd and bizarre way that Christmas culture relates to this advent. These posts are informed by G.K. Chesterton’s analysis of Christmas and Dickens. See Chesterton on Christmas in my notes, from his biography of Dickens.
Next in the series: Seasonal Commercialism