Behind door 1 of my advent calendar is:
BOB DYLAN
who, it seems, has ‘Christmas in the Heart’
Even at Christmas, not everyone in my family is a believer. Sadly my wife can’t see what is all too plain to me and if I ever try to speak to her about the wonder of it all she is want to roll her eyes or try and change the topic of conversation. And when it comes to my wanting to listen to his music then I will generally have to wait till I’m all alone in the house or out by myself in the car.
As well as being the day we start opening Advent calendars and making use of Christmas mugs, December 1st is also the day that we in the Aird residence dig out our Christmas CDs and begin to listen to them as part of the run up to December 25th. But, because of the aforementioned aversion to all things Dylanesque, one CD that is rarely played within earshot of the lady of the household is Bob’s 2009 album ‘Christmas in the Heart’.
Admittedly my wife is not this modern day troupadour’s only critic. One reviewer of his aforementioned compilation of festive classics suggested that Latin had never sounded more dead than when that ancient language was employed by Dylan to sing ‘Adeste Fideles’ – that’s ’O Come All Ye Faithful’ for those of you who, like me, had a classical education that was somewhat lacking!
Even so the words of this classic Christmas Carol are worth considering:
‘God of God,
Light of Light
Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb
Very God, begotten not created’
They are borrowed from the Nicene Creed of the fourth century which sought to make plain that the child who was born of Mary was, in very essence, God himself, something that John, an eyewitness of the life of Jesus, conveyed in the first chapter of his gospel when he wrote:
‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.…And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.’ [John 1:1-3,14]
This is what is meant by the incarnation – that God became a man in the person of Jesus Christ. And this is what we celebrate at Christmas.
*****
So with that said I’ll leave you with a track from ‘Christmas in the Heart’ that I’m proud to say that even my children consider a Yuletide classic – well at least one of them does. There may be better songs about the man ‘who’s got a big red cherry nose’ and ‘laughs this way, ‘Ho, ho, ho’’ – but if there is, I’ve never heard it!
It’s not for nothing that Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016!*
*It should be noted that ‘Must be Santa’ is not originally by Bob Dylan – but then there are those who say that neither was his Nobel Prize acceptance speech!
Some musings 