Listen to the SongsPermalink
TranscriptPermalink
Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today is the end of the third week of Advent, so following our pattern, we’re due for some complaining about songs.
But instead, today we’re looking at two child-adjacent songs that just aren’t carols the way we’ve been defining it: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
If you want to listen to those songs before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.
Now, today’s songs are not so bad I feel the need to dunk on them, so instead I really want to ask: where do these songs fit among the rest?
Let’s start with the red-nosed legend himself.
Rudolph isn’t a carol, right? It’s just a children’s Christmas song, which makes it perfect for a palate cleanser episode before we dive into this final week before Christmas.
The story is simple: Rudolph is an outcast. He’s got this deformity. He’s mocked for it. And he’s ignored until suddenly he becomes essential when his deformity becomes an asset—in this case, heavy fog.
And then he’s celebrated by the very reindeer who formerly persecuted him.
You know, this is the classic outcast becomes the chosen one story. Rudolph is basically the original young adult protagonist. This is Harry Potter with a red nose and antlers.
Parts of this story don’t pass the sniff test, though, right? Have they, like, never encountered fog before before Rudolph shows up in 1939?
And if you’ve ever driven in fog, you know that bright lights don’t make it easier to see. They just light up the area around you and make you just as blind as you were before.
I also have a little bit of a challenge with the idea of transactional love.
If someone only loves you for what you can do for them—if they only let you play their reindeer games because you guide them through the foggy night—that’s not love.
The moral it feels like we’re giving here is: If you’re weird but useful, society will accept you.
Merry Christmas, kids.
Rudolph is one clear night away from being weird again.
There is an opportunity here, however, for some Christian connections, and I’m willing to squint just hard enough to say a few things.
Here it is.
Jesus consistently moves toward the lowly, the least, and the lost. The ones with the funny red noses.
The shepherds were the first audience for the announcement of Jesus. I mean, they are serious outsiders: They are overlooked; they’re dirty; they’re smelly; they are kept in the fields on purpose, you know.
Mary is socially vulnerable: she’s an unwed mother. Probably, she should have been, you know, stoned to death, or at the very least, cast out of society.
Later, the disciples are also unimpressive: they’re fishermen or tax collectors or whatever they are.
Jesus comes to those that society has decided don’t really belong, no matter how much they come to rely on their fishing talent or rosy nose.
Jesus isn’t in this song, but it turns out that the one who is worthless becoming the one who is valued is a story that we really love to tell.
And that means that Rudolph is effectively a parable-shaped story. The rejected one becomes the one everyone needs.
You know, the stone the builders rejected becomes the chief cornerstone—
No, I’m not going to compare Rudolph to Jesus. Never mind.
Anyway, the origin of this song is truly wonderful.
In a way, it was actually funded by a department store, which feels extremely on-brand for modern Christmas.
The song was written in 1949 by Johnny Marks, the same guy who wrote the melody for I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago.
He based it on the 1939 story published by Montgomery Ward—the department store—also called Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. And that story was written by Robert May, who was Johnny Marks’ brother-in-law.
Gene Autry—the ultra-famous singer, actor, etc.—recorded it, and it hit number one on Christmas week 1949, and then immediately fell right back off the charts.
Let’s move on from that glowing nose to one of the most gorgeous melodies of the season: “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
This is another one of those songs that is just so pretty that I typically just let it wash over me, and I don’t listen to the words.
But if you do listen, it’s kind of like Luke chapter 2 retold as a chain of whispering messengers or a game of telephone, like a children’s story.
Here’s how it goes.
The night wind says to the lamb:
Do you see in the sky a star with a tail as big as a kite?
I have to say, that’s more of a comet than a fixed star, and a moving star is not super great for navigation, but it’s a children’s story, so we’re going to let it go.
Then the lamb passes the message along. It says to the shepherd:
Hey, do you hear a song with a voice as big as the sea?
I don’t know what a lamb knows about the sea, and I’m quite sure that if thousands of angels are singing to the shepherds, you don’t have to strain to hear it like some distant music box.
But the lamb is sharing his joy with the shepherd—or maybe her joy—and that’s what I want to focus on.
Sharing joy completes it.
The shepherd then somehow gets to the king in his palace wall, and I don’t know how he got the meeting with the king, but this is where some Christmas traditions start getting blended up, just like in We Three Kings.
The shepherds, the magi, the kings—all kind of mixed up in a single Bethlehem snow globe.
Even the gifts get a little bit muddled up. This song says silver and gold, but Matthew’s magi bring gold and frankincense and myrrh. No silver mentioned.
In the final verse, the king says to the people:
Pray for peace. He will bring us goodness and light.
And I have to say, I love this line.
Pray for peace is excellent Christmas music.
I’ve mentioned before that Jesus said, I come not to bring peace, but a sword.
But praying for peace—hey, that’s exactly where we should be.
Because He will eventually bring peace. And that will be a peace that’s deeper than just the absence of conflict. It will be true reconciliation.
And that line makes this song infinitely better than Happy Xmas by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, because this hope of peace is based on the Christ child, not on human nature—or worse, nothing at all.
This song actually came out of a peace movement, just like Happy Xmas did.
It was written in 1962 by a French World War II veteran named Noel Regney. The music was by his wife, Gloria Shane.
It was a plea for peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has come, probably, to destroying itself.
The first popular recording was by the Harry Simeone Chorale, which is the group that made The Little Drummer Boy famous in 1958.
But Bing Crosby recorded this song in 1963, and it absolutely exploded.
So this song—because of this history, because of this prayer, because we have a basis for peace—is not just snowy Christmas vibes.
It’s a real prayer for peace that history won’t end in fire.
So what do we do with these two songs?
Not to take ourselves too seriously, but I think they ask us questions about how we respond to Advent and to Christmas.
Rudolph asks:
What do we do with the excluded, the outcasts?
And Do You Hear What I Hear? asks:
What do we do with the announcement of the Christ child?
Will we, like the wind,
like the lamb,
like the shepherd,
like the king,
pass along that announcement?
I hope that you do.
Because that’s why we sing.
Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out VerseNotes Commons at: versenotes.org/commons.
We’ll be back tomorrow with another Carol of Christmas.
If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].
And if you enjoyed the episode, the best gift you can give me is to pass it along to someone else who would enjoy it too.