When Should We Sing Christmas Carols?

We have our church Carols on the lawn service coming up very soon. It’ll be a wonderful time together as a church family, together with friends to start to move our eyes and hearts forward to celebrating Christmas and the birth of our saviour. Laying my cards on the table, for a long time now I’ve loved Christmas carols and been of the opinion that they are so good that we should just sing them all year round. In fact, a number of them would have been sung all year round when they were first written. What has arisen recently in Christian circles is a light-hearted debate about when to sing carols. You will have those who think we should sing them all year around and those that think they should be saved for around Christmas time. Up until recently I would have been in the all year round group. But there is something significant about saving certain songs for certain occasions as well. This time of advent that is almost open us means ‘coming’. So in one sense we could just celebrate Jesus’ coming all year. However, the value of the church calendar is that its breadth is much larger than just Christ’s coming, the incarnation. The church calendar leads us through lent to Easter, Jesus’ ascension and Pentecost (the giving of the Spirit) and even in more ordinary Sunday’s we delve into the Trinity and other parts of our faith. My point is that the value, that I had under-appreciated before of the Carols just at Christmas time is it allows us to properly celebrate his coming and one point, without making it the whole story. There is a rightness to keeping songs for special occasions. Where does that leave me? I’m a have my Christmas pudding and eat it to kind of guy. I can see the value of singing some carols all year and also see value in just keeping them more to the advent season. What do you think?

Craig McCorkindale (Senior Assistant Minister)