From Inside a Music Box

I feel like I’m spending several hours in a music box.

And loving every minute of it!

Starting last evening, our Handbell Choir is playing an extended set at all three worship services this weekend.  Sitting up front where Pastor Leanne and I do, it’s like being surrounded by all their music.

They do I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day as our Prelude.

The story behind that song: Christmas day 1864…the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was having a horrible Christmas.  He was still mourning his wife’s death in a house-fire two years earlier.  He had just gotten word that his son had died in the Civil War.

As he sat surrounded by grief, a sound seeped through.  From the nearby church, he heard music.

He wrote several verses, starting with

I heard the bells on Christmas Day

Their old familiar carols play,

And wild and sweet,

the words repeat,

Of peace on earth, good will to men.

The entire poem was set to music in 1872.  Then the same composer who wrote Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer updated it in 1950.

Our Handbell Choir director, Chris Prince, plans on the group having an album available for next year’s Advent-Christmas season.  I’m guessing it’ll be a download as well as available on a CD.  I’ll bet I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day is on it.

Today, let’s you and me be listening for the message of some of those old familiar carols this Advent-Christmas season.

May they remind us of the timeless message of peace on earth, good will to all people everywhere.

And may we take action to be agents of that very peace and good will.