Christ in the Elevator

Had your fill of holiday music? Here's one popular song worth listening to -- and learning about.

The big event has finally arrived, and boy, am I tired of the music.

As usual, it’s everywhere — on the radio and the streaming services, in stores and elevators, on the phone while I wait for customer service. Many of these seasonal classics are catchy enough, but years of repetition have taken their toll on my patience. 

Then, for the umpteenth time this week, I heard, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Almost didn’t notice it. But I have, like all of us, been following the news from the Middle East. The three descending notes of the word “Bethlehem” suddenly hit me. People are dying over there, I thought, and I’m grousing about elevator music. Lord, forgive me.

The city of Christ’s birth, in what we now call the Israeli-occupied West Bank, is home to about 30,000 people, including several refugee camps and a sizeable Christian minority. Bethlehem has so far escaped the death and destruction of Gaza, about 40 miles away, but the town remains hemmed by Israeli checkpoints and growing despair.

The tourism-based local economy has collapsed, and people are so upset about the war that most seasonal traditions have been foregone, including the richly decorated Christmas tree in Manger Square. “How can we celebrate?” the town’s mayor, Hannah Hanahia, asked a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Said Father Issa Thaljieh, a priest at The Church of the Nativity: “These are very, very sad times.”

As it happens, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was itself born in troubled times: the aftermath of the American Civil War. Fighting had barely ended when Phillips Brooks, the rector of Philadelphia’s Trinity Church, rode a horse into Bethlehem on Christmas Eve 1865. He was so moved by the experience that he resolved to celebrate it in verse.

Took him a while. Late in December 1868, Brooks showed a four-stanza poem to the Trinity Church organist, Lewis Redner, and asked him to write some music for it — quickly, so the children’s choir could perform the new song at the Christmas service.

Redner tried for days, but the notes weren’t coming. On Christmas Eve, he went to bed despondent. Sometime that night, he later wrote, an angel awoke him and deposited a tune in his ear. A few hours later, the work received its world premiere. “Neither Mr. Brooks nor I,” he recounted, “ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868.”

A few months later, Brooks accepted a new post at Boston’s Trinity Church and took the song with him. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was published in a popular hymnal and gained popularity steadily. In 1906, the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams set Phillips’ lyrics to music based on an English folk song, and it remains the favored version in the U.K.  

In the U.S., the Brooks-Redner rendition is still a Christmas favorite, even though more secular, up-tempo ditties now tend to dominate the music-streaming market. At last glance, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 list.

“Bethlehem” is certainly not a holly-jolly-Christmas kind of song. In Phillips’ telling, the Christ child lies in a “deep and dreamless sleep” in that manger in Bethlehem, where his parents have just arrived after an exhausting journey. Something about a census.

The town was essentially under Roman rule then, and life wasn’t easy for Judeans like Mary and Joseph. In a nod to the insecurities of occupied peoples everywhere, the song refers to “the hopes and fears of all the years” represented in that swaddled infant.

Word got out that a Savior had been born, and the Roman-installed King Herod ordered the slaughter of all the territory’s males under age two. The Holy Family fled to the relative safety of Nazareth.

Christianity has gone on to greatness, with more than 2 billion followers around the world. So, it’s easy to forget that the religion was born in anxiety and oppression — and that the faithful have for centuries been marking that occasion with appropriately solemn, hopeful music.

Traditional Christmas songs like “O Little Town of Bethlehem” may sometimes seem a bit tired to modern ears, especially after so much repetition, but the music’s message of hope and redemption still merits attention. That’s why God invented elevators.