A Christmas Carol

For the recent Christmas celebration, I was fortunate to experience it with most of my extended family even my relatives from Singapore who came to Kuala Lumpur. As usual there was a splendid Christmas dinner which most of us (but me) helped to prepare and as usual, there were carols to be sung. I had never really paid much attention to Christmas carols before, but this year, my mom wanted me to prepare a selection of carols in MIDI format to be sung later on. After looking through the list of songs, I realized that many of them had little connection to the actual meaning of Christmas. In fact most of them had nothing to do with Christianity. I read the lyrics for ‘Frosty the Snowman’ for the first time (really) and found nothing in relation to Christmas. The song was about a magical snowman and him having fun before his time went out. Songs like ‘Jingle Bells’, ‘Winter Wonderland’, and ‘Let it Snow’ are mostly about the season of winter which would be unfamiliar to us living in a tropical country like Malaysia. Perhaps those songs originated in Europe or America where Christmas was during the season of winter but the fact remains that such songs have totally influenced the meaning of Christmas. Most people associate Christmas with snow, Santa Claus and other commercialized features and some even forget why the holiday is significant in the first place. Of course, there are some carols that reflect the Christian meaning of Christmas like ‘Hark now hear the Angels sing’ but they are too few in comparison to the other ‘commercialized’ carols. Even in malls when they play carols for the pleasure of shoppers, how often is it that one hears the carol ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ compared to ‘Jingle Bell Rock’?

I was reminded of another holiday I experienced in Canada- Halloween. Last year was my first encounter with Halloween (which is sadly not celebrated in Malaysia) and I too found it disturbing because like Christmas, Halloween has become over-commercialized. People dress up in outrageous costumes and get drunk all night but how many people know the original reason for celebrating Halloween? It started out as the Celtic harvest festival Sam Hain and people used to believe that at that time, the boundaries between the living world and the spiritual world would weaken, hence all the dressing up was to frighten away evil spirits. I asked one of my friends if he knew how the name Halloween came about and he was clueless. For those of you who are also clueless, Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows (saints) Eve as it was on the eve of All Saints Day- November 1^st. The church intentionally chose that day as it was already familiar to the people as Sam Hain.

I would give a brief history for Christmas too, but I expect more people would know it better than All Hallows Eve. I certainly hope that when I return for 2008’s Christmas, there would be more emphasis on the Christian, rather than the commercial aspect.