Christmas Carol Devotion #3: Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

Really, I'm just following the order of the YouVersion devotional plan. I would not have put this song into the list, personally. I like the song okay, but I have a feeling I'm going to be upset down the road when one of my favorite carols is missing (like O Holy Night or The First Noel).

Anyway, I like most of the sultry female voice versions of this song that I've heard on the radio, but I also really like the Relient K version of this song - I used it as the background to our announcement video this past Sunday.

I want to focus on the first three lines of this song:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
From now on our troubles will be out of sight

Did you know that these lyrics were not the original lyrics? This song was written for a musical starring Judy Garland called Meet Me In St. Louis. Garland and the director of the musical criticized the lyrics as depressing. I don't blame them, look at the original first three lines:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
It may be your last
Next year we may all be living in the past

Depressing, huh? Did you know that another line in this song was changed at an even later date, after several versions became popular? The original line "From now on we'll have to muddle through somehow" was changed to "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough."

Can you imagine this song being popular at all with the original lyric? No way. We want our Christmas to be merry and bright. Which I definitely agree with, although I think sometimes our desire for a merry Christmas blinds us to the fact that the first Christmas had some merriness to it; yet it also had a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, etc. Two songs remind me of this. One is a song from the CD Behold The Lamb Of God by Andrew Peterson. Just two nights ago I got to see A.P. and friends perform this entire CD in concert, it was amazing. Anyway, one of the songs is called Labor Of Love and it starts out like this:

It was not a silent night
There was blood on the ground
You could hear a woman cry
In the alleyways that night
On the streets of David's town

And the stable was not clean
And the cobblestones were cold
And little Mary full of grace
With the tears upon her face
Had no mother's hand to hold

Another song, which I'm contemplating doing this Sunday for special music, reminds us of the forces at work - both spiritual and human - when Christ was born and how it is the same today as it was then.

If You were born today
We'd kill You by age eight
Never get the chance to say
Joy to the world, peace on the earth
Forgive them for they know not what they do...

By all means, let's have a merry Christmas. But let's not forget that a woman had labor pains, it was cold in the stable, babies were killed by the insane king Herod, a family had to flee to Egypt, and a baby would grow up to one day die on a cruel cross for things He did not do.