A lapsed Episcopalian relents

Christmas… 🍒🌲

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Catherine: I’m going up to the church to hear carol singing.

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Noëline: Carol who?

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Catherine: Carol the song, not the singer. Carol singing. Come on.

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Noëline: But I’m an Episcopalian, and a lapsed one at that.

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Catherine: Just for once a year. Take bread and wine, the vicar won’t mind. He encourages multidenominationalism. He has to nowadays with a shrinking congregation. Numbers dwindling as they are.

Origins of uplift

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Noëline: Hmm. Carols always struck me as rather dirge-like. But maybe seeing the inside of a church would uplift the spirit a bit.

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Voice-over

Perhaps the origin of carols as pagan songs sung while dancing around stones influence some people like Noëline to regard carols as a less exciting music genre. As this pagan music was adopted by Christians their fortunes waxed (Francis of Assisi’s Nativity Plays, 1223), waned and went underground under the Puritans in 1640, then were resurrected in the Victorian period when Sandys and Gilbert began collecting them.

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