Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol – 2022

Several months ago I read all of Chesterton’s columns for the Illustrated London News from 1926. When I posted about that reading at the time, I mentioned that I would come back to it in December, since the series ended with a wonderful piece about old Christmas carols. In this last, beautiful column, Chesterton ascribes three special virtues to old Christmas carols: (1) anachronism, which shows that the events of Christmas and its celebration are continuously present in a spiritual sense throughout history, (2) incongruity, which makes little logical sense but great poetic sense, and (3) lustiness such that people sometimes shout “Ut hoy!” in celebration of Christ’s birth.

Now, I have to think that Chesterton knew many more truly old carols than I do. I don’t know the one, for instance, that contains shouts of “Ut hoy!” But I do know a couple of carols about holly that seem to fit GKC’s description perfectly.

The first carol I’m trolling today is “The Holly Bears a Berry.”

1. Now the holly bears a berry as white as the milk,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who was wrapped up in silk:

Chorus: And Mary she bore Jesus our Saviour for to be,
And the first tree that's in the greenwood, it was the holly.
Holly! Holly!
And the first tree that's in the greenwood, it was the holly!

2. Now the holly bears a berry as green as the grass,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who died on the cross:

Chorus

3. Now the holly bears a berry as black as the coal,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who died for us all:

Chorus

4. Now the holly bears a berry, as blood is it red,
Then trust we our Saviour, who rose from the dead:

Chorus

Anachronism? Not exactly. But I think the mix of tenses in every verse accomplishes the same thing. The holly bears a berry in the present tense now, and Mary bore Jesus in the past tense in, perhaps, 4 B.C. But maybe there is some anachronism in the assignment of the colors. I had to look up the white berry: the berries on my holly bushes are never white. But according to the internet, which might actually be right in this case, a Christian legend says that the berries were white until the time of the crucifixion. I wasn’t familiar with this legend until this morning, but it sounds a lot like the legends printed on cedar signs I used to study in roadside Stuckey’s restaurants. (Talk about anachronism and incongruity!) According to this very important and informative bit of childhood reading, both the dogwood flower and the burro mystically acquired their cross-shaped markings during the original Holy Week. If we accept the legend, this carol sings of the holly as bearing, in the present tense, berries it hasn’t born in two thousand years.

I honestly don’t know that I understood why I have always loved the verses of this carol so much until Chesterton pointed out the vitality of incongruity in this literature. Some songwriter not as wise as the anonymous farmers of Cornwall who shaped this poem over generations – some silly songwriter like me, for instance – would have tried to get the bloody red in the same verse as the cross and the living green in the verse with the Resurrection. How much better the carol is the way it stands! Death in life, life in death.

Lustiness? What could be more “lusty” than stopping the lilting beat in the middle of each stanza to exclaim the word “holly” twice? Have you ever shouted that word before? The next time you find yourself walking through the woods wondering why life isn’t making any sense, I hope you come across a holly bush and get a chance to start the habit.

The other carol today is clearly related to the first. Maybe a fellow in Gloucestershire visited Cornwall, heard “The Holly Bears a Berry,” and tried to bring it home, but forgot parts or tried to improve it. Maybe the geographical journey went the other way. Maybe both carols stand as descendants of some forgotten Ur-carol that connected the holly and the birth of Jesus. However it was, here are the lyrics, as currently known, of “The Holly and the Ivy”:

1. The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.

Chorus: Oh! The rising of the sun
And the running of the deer,
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the choir!

2. The holly bears a blossom,
As white as the lily flower,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ,
To be our sweet Saviour.

Chorus

3. The holly bears a berry,
As red as any blood,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For to do us sinners good.

Chorus   

4. The holly bears a prickle,
As sharp as any thorn,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas Day in the morn.

Chorus

I want to go through Chesterton’s three qualities in reverse order this time. I hate “contemporary” “worship” “songs” that forget sentence structure and just start stringing spiritual sounding phrases together without any verbs. I like verbs. But I love this verbless chorus with all my heart and have since I first sang it in the third-grade Christmas concert at Maude V. Roark Elementary School in Arlington, TX. (Arlington consisted of a couple of neighborhoods of houses, the Hollandale Circle apartments – where my family lived –, Roark school, a Walmart, and Six Flags. That’s all my eight-year-old mind took in, but I honestly don’t think there was much more. I just looked up the school: it closed last year and was demolished! May the echoes of “The Holly and the Ivy” reverberate around the area forever!)

Anyway, back to the chorus of this carol. I don’t care about verbs here. I just want to sing lustilly about four beautiful things! In fact, as I sing this song, I start to wonder if these aren’t my four favorite things in the universe! The running of the deer! Why haven’t I thought to celebrate that before! Oh, glorious!

Now what the deer and the organ have to do with each other or what either has to do with a holly’s berries or blossoms, I don’t know. But the poem works its aesthetic magic as we sing it, and it is clear to our minds that all these things, incongruous at first glance, form one perfect unity of ideas to which nothing could be added, from which nothing could be taken. I used to think there was a slight imperfection in this otherwise integral organism with the mention of the organ, which didn’t exist when Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ. But Chesterton has taught me that the anachronism is part of the point: our means of celebrating and singing dwell in mystical unity with the songs of the angels and the shepherds on the Holy Night.

You know what this world needs? People need to stop “trolling” each other on social media and start trolling ancient yuletide carols!