Blogmas Day 5: My Favourite Christmas Song

Hello! Welcome to Blogmas Day 5!

I was going to do a Top 10 Favourite Christmas Songs list today, but I really struggled to narrow it down. I love Christmas music! I’ve never been the type to get annoyed about hearing it too early or too late. There are some Christmas songs I listen to all year. Why on earth not? It’s good music!

Anyway, one song does stand out above the rest, though, so I thought I’d talk about just that one song today. And it’s also literature-related, so it’s even book-blog relevant! But I’ll get to all that in a minute. First, it’s time for a terrible photo of today’s jigsaw puzzle from my advent calendar:

No unexpected guests this time like yesterday’s plastic pig. 🤣 Oh well, maybe tomorrow!

My Favourite Christmas Song

Okay, let’s talk about my absolute favourite Christmas song of all time. This isn’t a song that a lot of people have covered, but I haven’t yet met a cover of it that I didn’t like. However, I’ll be sharing my two favourite, yet vastly different, covers, one of which is my answer to the Colbert Questionert question, “You get one song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it?”

But first, let’s talk about the story behind the song.

The lyricist: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Around Christmas time in 1863, American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was already grieving the sudden death of his wife when he got word that his son had been gravely wounded in the American Civil War. As the Christmas bells rang out their song of “peace on earth” on Christmas morning, Longfellow felt like the violence and despair around him mocked the Christmas message and all it stood for. So he sat down in his sorrow and wrote a poem of hope:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play…

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said…

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
    The Wrong shall fail,
    The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

You can read the full ‘Christmas Bells’ poem here on poets.org.

Every year, I find more and more relevance in Longfellow’s poem and the Christmas carol it became. That last verse (or the penultimate verse in some versions of the carol) moves me and encourages me every single time.

A Tale of Two Covers

I grew up listening to Bing Crosby’s cover of I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, and that was when I first fell in love with this song. It took me a few years to really listen to the lyrics, but once I did, I started to cry. I love the way Bing’s voice gets deeper and more authoritative on the last verse, really driving home the message of hope.

You can listen to his version of the song here:

But it was when I heard Johnny Reid’s version a few years ago that this became my absolute favourite song. I listen to his cover all year round, and it’s the song I would choose to answer the “only one song to listen to for the rest of your life” question. I literally have listened to this song on repeat for days on end. 🤣 It’s just SO GOOD and uplifting and inspiring. I love this arrangement of the verses, and the full orchestra playing, and Johnny’s gravelly voice, and… it’s just perfect. 🥰