Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Christmas Music: The Key to a Joyful Christmas


 Christmas is supposed to be a season of Joy, not stress. Just in case you forgot.

Anyway for me the key to Christmas is the music.  I love singing out at church and at home to the classics and newer renditions of songs as people put their own spin on the songs.   Christmas still inspires new music to be written by popular and Christian artists, by punk bands, country singers, and rappers.  Christmas inspires us to sing out to sing songs new and old as the Christmas story reminds us of the greatest gift ever given and helps us to focus on what God wants us to be, by reminding us of his humility, peace and joy.  I hope you enjoy the Christmas Playlist as you read.

The song I'm going to focus on is Away in the Manger.  It's a song by Martin Luther who wrote a lot about the manger as a symbol of Christmas. What impacted me most was that he talked about how today we are the manger, because we hold Jesus.  The question for us is are we carrying Christ to the world, are we holding him up so that they can come and worship like the Shepherds and wise men?
Or are we just full of other stuff.  Manger comes from the french word meaning to eat.  I think of the Italian, Mangia! Mangia! Eat! Eat! for some reason.  I guess the alternative to holding the Christ child is for us to be full of common things.  For a manger it is food for the animals, but today it might be that Christmas is just about big family meals and get togethers.  Maybe it's more about the "consuming" part, and it's just about gorging on all the stuff and sales.  But it's meant to be different to really have a Christmas story we need to provide a place for the sweet child's head, the prince of peace.  Amen.

Also Enjoy this new Manger song by Chris Tomlin.

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