It's the most wonderful time of the year. At least that's what Andy Williams used to say on my mother's old record that she used to play while we decorated the tree when I was a kid. Back then, my mother's records were the only Christmas music available to listen to in the season leading up to the actual holiday, with the exceptions of the carols sung in church during Advent* and the
occasional airing of "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" on the AM country station my dad listened to in the mornings. Nowadays, of course, every major metropolitan center has a station that seems to dedicate a good month of its programming to Christmas music, and I'm pretty sure that Andy Williams has reminded me that it is, in fact, the most wonderful time of this particular year at least two dozen times since Thanksgiving.
While the constant presence of Christmas music on the airwaves, to say nothing of it's being piped through retail and grocery stores may be very festive and serve to subconsciously help us enjoy the season, it also tends to fade into what it literally is, i.e. background noise. As a result, most of us don't think too terribly much about what it is saying. Sometimes, maybe that's a good thing, as feminists have recently reminded us with regards to "Baby it's Cold Outside."** But often, I feel like it would be a good thing to actually engage the mind and soul a little bit when listening to Christmas music. I had this thought again recently when, stopped at a rather lengthy traffic light, I was forced to actually listen to the words of "The Little Drummer Boy," and I realized that it is actually a pretty lyrically profound song. Well, with the exception of the "parumpumpumpum," that is just a vocal attempt to mimic a drum and not terribly filled with meaning, but the rest of the song tells a pretty decent little story. Since it's the week of Christmas, and since I've nothing more pressing to write on, I thought I'd spend this blog post explicating a little of the meaning that struck me at the traffic light. Maybe lyrical explication will be something of a semi-regular feature on this blog. We'll see how it goes.
Come, they told me
A newborn king to see. (I'll be skipping explication of the parumpumpumpums -- as I said above, it's a drum)
History tells us that the "Little Drummer Boy" was penned by Katherine K. Davis in 1941, supposedly as a transcription of a traditional Czech Carol, which has never been identified. The story is apparently that of a poor drummer boy summoned by the three wise men to accompany them as they pay homage to the newborn Christ child. The inclusion of the drummer boy is, of course, wholly apocryphal and found nowhere in biblical accounts, but it does, particularly in these lines, express a spirit quite appropriate to a holiday celebrating the birth of Christ. That spirit being an invitation to everyone to come and adore the newborn king. Unlike virtually every other royal baby that has ever been born anywhere in the history of the world, nobody is excluded from visiting this baby in the maternity ward on the basis of class. That becomes all the more profound and humbling when one considers that this is the incarnate God laying in the manger.
Our finest gifts we bring
To lay before our king
When we come.
Bringing gifts is only appropriate. We still do this for the birth of nearly every baby, but of course in the case of a newborn king, the gifts are the finest that can be afforded. This idea will become important in the next verse. One of the great things about this carol that I've recently come to realize is the way that it narratively builds upon itself. Here again, by the way, Jesus is exclusive among all royals and even all aristocrats and celebrities in the history of the world. This is the only case I know of where giving gifts to a royal personage is not a case of the materially rich getting materially richer at the material expense of the poorer from whom they are receiving the gifts.
Little baby
I am a poor boy too.
The "too" is the operative word here. Much has been made of God's coming down to earth as a humble, poor man, and there's nothing I'm going to say here to add to what is already a very theologically dense field of discussion. What struck me at the traffic light as I was listening to this song, though, is something that is both much more simple and at the same time much more touching, which is this: the thought of a child identifying with the infant Christ as a fellow "poor boy." Let that sink in for a minute. The king of heaven is simpatico with a poor drummer boy.
I have no gift to bring
That's fit to give a king.
This is not unexpected. We've already established that the kid is poor. Given, however, that we're talking about a kid at Christmas, it's touching that he's more worried about not having anything to give than not getting anything. It's heart-wrenching enough to think about a poor kid's disappointment at not receiving anything from Santa Claus on Christmas; it does far more to wrangle our better angels to think for a bit about a kid's anxiety at not having anything to give.
Shall I play for you
On my drum?
But of course, he's reminded that he does, in fact, have something to give. He can play his drum. Wikipedia, the one apostolic repository of all information, tells us that "The Carol of the Drum," as this song was initially called, is very similar to a French medieval miracle story called "Le Jongleur de Notre Dame." In this old legend, a juggler turns monk, and when the monks come to present their offerings at the statue of the Madonna, he has nothing to give, so he juggles. The other monks are predisposed to punish him for blasphemy, but the statue validates his gift by smiling (or throwing a rose at him, or both, depending upon the version). The point here is that not only does Jesus identify with the poorest of his creation, he also joyfully accepts whatever it is that we can give. More on this in a moment.
Mary nodded.
As in the legend of Le Jongleur,*** Mary approves of this gift of entertainment.
The ox and lamb kept time.
This line is filler. I won't go so far as to say a poetic mistake, but it doesn't add much. I grew up on a ranch, and I can't find any profundity here, other than to emphasize we are in a stable -- humble beginnings and all.
I played my drum for him.
I played my best for him.
The imagery here again is incredibly touching, if we let it be. Everyone, especially parents, know what it's like to watch a kid try his darnedest at something. My 6 year old likes to draw. Some of his work i
s pretty proficient, but I think I actually prefer the stuff that tries for more but doesn't quite get there (as at left). There's just something rather uplifting about a kid striving to do something good. It's even more soul-stirring when he's trying with all his might to do something good for somebody else. That's what's going on here: a kid with no gift to bring that is fit to give the creator of the universe (and really this describes us all, no matter how rich we are) doing the only thing he can do and doing it as best as he can. I like to picture the drummer boy as not necessarily all that good on the drum and being in some senses half aware of that fact. It makes the image more emotionally stirring for me.
Then he smiled at me,
Me and my drum.
This is perhaps the profoundest image in the song. The infant Christ smiling at the effort of the drummer boy. The little bit of (possibly poorly played) entertainment that the child drumm
er can offer the baby Jesus is pleasing to him. If we recall that the song traditionally has the young drummer accompanying the wise men, then we can surmise that this little riff on the drum strikes Jesus as just as good as, if not better than, the gold, frankincense, and myrrh, undoubtedly so because it is given with just as much effort of heart as those gifts that are given by the magi. So much of this is really theological commonplace, but it's made all the more meaningful if you think about it while holding in mind at the same time the task of getting a baby to smile. One of these (see picture at right) is actually pretty hard to procure, and pretty bloody satisfying when you get one. And this is the closing image of the song: The Creator of the universe is laying there as an infant in a manger; being honored by kings from the orient with costly gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh; angels are singing and possibly visible overhead; one star has suddenly stood out from the rest of the astronomical cosmos and is beaming noticeably down on this stable; and among all of this, it's the simple little riff of a poor and not terribly skilled drummer boy that produces a baby smile out of the incarnate God.
Again, it's all quite apocryphal, and undoubtedly susceptible of being pooh-poohed by biblical scholars and skeptical postmoderns alike. But I think the spirit of this little carol is quite appropriate to the spirit of Christmas and, for that matter, to the spirit of Christianity. It certainly deserves to be more than background noise. So the next time you hear it piping through whatever speaker is bathing you in the sounds of the season, might I encourage you to slow down and take a minute to listen and engage your soul. I suspect it will do good things for you.
*Many modern evangelical churches have abandoned the practice of singing old carols at Christmas (along with the rest of the church calendar it seems) in favor of sticking with the contemporary praise choruses that are the standard fare of every other week and very few of which seem to celebrate Christmas as such. I'm not sure why they do this. Perhaps it's that the contemporary music is felt to go better with the music of the worship band. Perhaps it's an unexamined but held over aversion to old carols as being too ceremonial and thus too much like musty old Roman Catholicism. I don't know what it is, but as the rest of this blog will attempt to point out in one specific case, we rob ourselves of a whole world of potential meaning and celebration by not singing all the verses of a carol in church, and this is to say nothing of the enjoyment of celebrating the seasons (something I wrote on in an earlier post on craft brewing). In any case, yours truly is dying to sing 4 verses of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" in the congregation -- not the first verse set to a zippier arrangement with an intellectually puerile chorus that we repeat several times as opposed to pondering the poetry of following verses, but the old carol as it was originally set down in its entirety. I digress here, of course, but that's why it's in a footnote, so as not to interrupt the original post with the digression.
**On the other hand, maybe the feminists actually want us to think more closely about what this song is saying and then excise it from the canon. They probably have a point, but that would be a little sad. In any case, the song makes for a hell of a good Barnes and Noble commercial.
***In case it isn't readily apparent, Le Jongleur is French for The Juggler.
While the constant presence of Christmas music on the airwaves, to say nothing of it's being piped through retail and grocery stores may be very festive and serve to subconsciously help us enjoy the season, it also tends to fade into what it literally is, i.e. background noise. As a result, most of us don't think too terribly much about what it is saying. Sometimes, maybe that's a good thing, as feminists have recently reminded us with regards to "Baby it's Cold Outside."** But often, I feel like it would be a good thing to actually engage the mind and soul a little bit when listening to Christmas music. I had this thought again recently when, stopped at a rather lengthy traffic light, I was forced to actually listen to the words of "The Little Drummer Boy," and I realized that it is actually a pretty lyrically profound song. Well, with the exception of the "parumpumpumpum," that is just a vocal attempt to mimic a drum and not terribly filled with meaning, but the rest of the song tells a pretty decent little story. Since it's the week of Christmas, and since I've nothing more pressing to write on, I thought I'd spend this blog post explicating a little of the meaning that struck me at the traffic light. Maybe lyrical explication will be something of a semi-regular feature on this blog. We'll see how it goes.
Come, they told me
A newborn king to see. (I'll be skipping explication of the parumpumpumpums -- as I said above, it's a drum)
History tells us that the "Little Drummer Boy" was penned by Katherine K. Davis in 1941, supposedly as a transcription of a traditional Czech Carol, which has never been identified. The story is apparently that of a poor drummer boy summoned by the three wise men to accompany them as they pay homage to the newborn Christ child. The inclusion of the drummer boy is, of course, wholly apocryphal and found nowhere in biblical accounts, but it does, particularly in these lines, express a spirit quite appropriate to a holiday celebrating the birth of Christ. That spirit being an invitation to everyone to come and adore the newborn king. Unlike virtually every other royal baby that has ever been born anywhere in the history of the world, nobody is excluded from visiting this baby in the maternity ward on the basis of class. That becomes all the more profound and humbling when one considers that this is the incarnate God laying in the manger.
Our finest gifts we bring
To lay before our king
When we come.
Bringing gifts is only appropriate. We still do this for the birth of nearly every baby, but of course in the case of a newborn king, the gifts are the finest that can be afforded. This idea will become important in the next verse. One of the great things about this carol that I've recently come to realize is the way that it narratively builds upon itself. Here again, by the way, Jesus is exclusive among all royals and even all aristocrats and celebrities in the history of the world. This is the only case I know of where giving gifts to a royal personage is not a case of the materially rich getting materially richer at the material expense of the poorer from whom they are receiving the gifts.
Little baby
I am a poor boy too.
The "too" is the operative word here. Much has been made of God's coming down to earth as a humble, poor man, and there's nothing I'm going to say here to add to what is already a very theologically dense field of discussion. What struck me at the traffic light as I was listening to this song, though, is something that is both much more simple and at the same time much more touching, which is this: the thought of a child identifying with the infant Christ as a fellow "poor boy." Let that sink in for a minute. The king of heaven is simpatico with a poor drummer boy.
I have no gift to bring
That's fit to give a king.
This is not unexpected. We've already established that the kid is poor. Given, however, that we're talking about a kid at Christmas, it's touching that he's more worried about not having anything to give than not getting anything. It's heart-wrenching enough to think about a poor kid's disappointment at not receiving anything from Santa Claus on Christmas; it does far more to wrangle our better angels to think for a bit about a kid's anxiety at not having anything to give.
Shall I play for you
On my drum?
But of course, he's reminded that he does, in fact, have something to give. He can play his drum. Wikipedia, the one apostolic repository of all information, tells us that "The Carol of the Drum," as this song was initially called, is very similar to a French medieval miracle story called "Le Jongleur de Notre Dame." In this old legend, a juggler turns monk, and when the monks come to present their offerings at the statue of the Madonna, he has nothing to give, so he juggles. The other monks are predisposed to punish him for blasphemy, but the statue validates his gift by smiling (or throwing a rose at him, or both, depending upon the version). The point here is that not only does Jesus identify with the poorest of his creation, he also joyfully accepts whatever it is that we can give. More on this in a moment.
Mary nodded.
As in the legend of Le Jongleur,*** Mary approves of this gift of entertainment.
The ox and lamb kept time.
This line is filler. I won't go so far as to say a poetic mistake, but it doesn't add much. I grew up on a ranch, and I can't find any profundity here, other than to emphasize we are in a stable -- humble beginnings and all.
I played my drum for him.
I played my best for him.
The imagery here again is incredibly touching, if we let it be. Everyone, especially parents, know what it's like to watch a kid try his darnedest at something. My 6 year old likes to draw. Some of his work i
s pretty proficient, but I think I actually prefer the stuff that tries for more but doesn't quite get there (as at left). There's just something rather uplifting about a kid striving to do something good. It's even more soul-stirring when he's trying with all his might to do something good for somebody else. That's what's going on here: a kid with no gift to bring that is fit to give the creator of the universe (and really this describes us all, no matter how rich we are) doing the only thing he can do and doing it as best as he can. I like to picture the drummer boy as not necessarily all that good on the drum and being in some senses half aware of that fact. It makes the image more emotionally stirring for me.Then he smiled at me,
Me and my drum.
This is perhaps the profoundest image in the song. The infant Christ smiling at the effort of the drummer boy. The little bit of (possibly poorly played) entertainment that the child drumm
er can offer the baby Jesus is pleasing to him. If we recall that the song traditionally has the young drummer accompanying the wise men, then we can surmise that this little riff on the drum strikes Jesus as just as good as, if not better than, the gold, frankincense, and myrrh, undoubtedly so because it is given with just as much effort of heart as those gifts that are given by the magi. So much of this is really theological commonplace, but it's made all the more meaningful if you think about it while holding in mind at the same time the task of getting a baby to smile. One of these (see picture at right) is actually pretty hard to procure, and pretty bloody satisfying when you get one. And this is the closing image of the song: The Creator of the universe is laying there as an infant in a manger; being honored by kings from the orient with costly gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh; angels are singing and possibly visible overhead; one star has suddenly stood out from the rest of the astronomical cosmos and is beaming noticeably down on this stable; and among all of this, it's the simple little riff of a poor and not terribly skilled drummer boy that produces a baby smile out of the incarnate God.Again, it's all quite apocryphal, and undoubtedly susceptible of being pooh-poohed by biblical scholars and skeptical postmoderns alike. But I think the spirit of this little carol is quite appropriate to the spirit of Christmas and, for that matter, to the spirit of Christianity. It certainly deserves to be more than background noise. So the next time you hear it piping through whatever speaker is bathing you in the sounds of the season, might I encourage you to slow down and take a minute to listen and engage your soul. I suspect it will do good things for you.
*Many modern evangelical churches have abandoned the practice of singing old carols at Christmas (along with the rest of the church calendar it seems) in favor of sticking with the contemporary praise choruses that are the standard fare of every other week and very few of which seem to celebrate Christmas as such. I'm not sure why they do this. Perhaps it's that the contemporary music is felt to go better with the music of the worship band. Perhaps it's an unexamined but held over aversion to old carols as being too ceremonial and thus too much like musty old Roman Catholicism. I don't know what it is, but as the rest of this blog will attempt to point out in one specific case, we rob ourselves of a whole world of potential meaning and celebration by not singing all the verses of a carol in church, and this is to say nothing of the enjoyment of celebrating the seasons (something I wrote on in an earlier post on craft brewing). In any case, yours truly is dying to sing 4 verses of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" in the congregation -- not the first verse set to a zippier arrangement with an intellectually puerile chorus that we repeat several times as opposed to pondering the poetry of following verses, but the old carol as it was originally set down in its entirety. I digress here, of course, but that's why it's in a footnote, so as not to interrupt the original post with the digression.
**On the other hand, maybe the feminists actually want us to think more closely about what this song is saying and then excise it from the canon. They probably have a point, but that would be a little sad. In any case, the song makes for a hell of a good Barnes and Noble commercial.
***In case it isn't readily apparent, Le Jongleur is French for The Juggler.
Interesting...Can't count how many times I've sung or heard the song but never considered (in depth) what it was saying. Thanks for taking the long traffic signal time to bring some enlightenment to my life. Merry Christmas from Joliet, MT!
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