Today I want to share with you a piece of an article that I wrote for PCM that will appear later today, right here on this web-site.
The article is piece describing the history and/or meaning of 5 different Christmas Carols and 5 different Christmas songs. The Christmas song that most applies to our purposes here is God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen was written in old English and though most of the lyric translated well in today’s English. The title did not. Looking at the title in today’s vernacular you could say “God put to sleep these very happy guys.” But this would be wrong.
In old English, the word “rest” actually meant “make.” And the word “merry” actually meant “mighty” so the title of the song is really saying “God make you mighty gentlemen. “ God will do this to the men, by their remembrance that is instructed in the second and third lines, “Remember Christ our savior was born on Christmas day, “To save us all from Satan’s power when we had gone astray.”
This is actually very cool as it is saying that remembering Jesus and his work here on Earth will help give us power to live our lives in God’s will.
There is a second application to this as well. The term “Merry Christmas” started at about the same time. So when people said “Merry Christmas” to each other, back in those days, they were not wishing each other a good time, they were proclaiming “Mighty Christmas” in much the same way as Christians on Easter say to each other, “He is risen.” And the reply “He is risen indeed”
On Christmas God touched Earth he became a human and a baby. This indeed makes the day, mighty Christmas!
For the rest of the article that this blog is based on come back later today to www.popculturemadness.com.
