"As the snow lay round about"

On Thanksgiving weekend, I always dig out our Christmas music collection.  John buys a couple new CD's each year, so in 20 years it's turned into a big box.  The latest addition is Christmas with Marty Robbins (no kidding) originally released when I was 17.

The old albums are the best-- young Doris Day has a voice like a naughty earth angel, and Mel Torme's snappy version of Good King Wenceslas makes my eyes prickle every time I hear it. Along with Holly and the Ivy, it's my favorite carol. I can't explain why some of these old songs have such an emotional trigger. On the other hand, once a year is probably often enough to suffer through A Little Drummer Boy and The Twelve Days of Christmas. Especially at the grocery store.

This month the BBC Music Magazine had a good article about how the Victorians gave us our familiar Christmas music. For that matter, the Victorians gave us just about all our Christmas traditions, helped along by the family-oriented Victoria and Albert, and Dickens, in A Christmas Carol.  Before then, they say Christmas hymns were pretty dull, and Harvest was the favored church festival in early winter.

The breakthrough in Christmas music came to England from Finland in 1853, when James Mason Neale wrote new lyrics to a medieval spring carol and called it Good King Wenceslas.

In about 1850, the Swedish ambassador to Britain gave Neale a rare copy of a sacred songbook published in Finland in the 13th century.  Wenceslas was originally written in Latin, and the old lyrics went like this:

Spring has now unwrapped the flowers,
Day is fast reviving, 
Life in all her growing powers
Toward the light is striving...

And so on, you know the tune. But Neale, in a moment of genius wrote:

Good King Wenceslas first looked out, 
On the Feast of Stephen, 
When the snow lay all about
Deep and crisp and even.

It was the first time a Christmas song was associated with snow. All the ancient wassails and carols, even those from Finland, make no mention of snow. 

Along with an excellent tune, the carol has a good legend.  "King" Wenceslas braved harsh weather on the second day of Christmas (December 26th) to give alms to a poor peasant. When his page is about to give up the struggle, he continues on by walking in the melted footprints of the saint.  Charity, leadership, bravery, generosity, faith, trust and other good Christmassy things all in one carol.

In real history, Wenceslas was actually a Boehemian Duke, assassinated in 935, supposedly by his own brother, Bolesalv the Cruel. Duke Wenceslas was murdered during a feast at precisely the time Boleslav's son was born. Later Bolesalv was remorseful for the fratricide, and decided to educate his son as a clergyman. Wenceslas became a saint, his brother did not.