Themnal

December 27, 2013

Since the family is moving out of Grandma’s house this weekend (which has eaten up my time and made the daily posting here rather difficult but whatever), I have been occasionally just claiming items around the house I feel like keeping that no one else cares about anyway. One item I snatched last week was Grandma’s 1982 hymnal.

When I went home that night, I looked through the Christmas songs in it. Some I never heard of anywhere else, while others were very familiar and were sung on Tuesday night, as well as ones not done then but heard of nonetheless.

One song was Good Christian Men Rejoice. Only the lyrics didn’t say that. It said “Good Christian Friends Rejoice”. Huh.

Then Christmas Eve night, at the service, singing some of the very familiar songs out of copies of the same hymnal, I noticed some of the slight variations to the lyrics from more popular versions. In the second verse of Hark the Herald Angels Sing, where it’s usually “Pleased as man with men to dwell”, it instead read “Pleased as man with us to dwell”. And in the third verse, where it’s usually “born that men no more may die” it was “born that we no more may die”, and then where it’s usually “born to raise the sons of earth” it was instead “born to raise us from the earth” or something like that. Plus a few other little alterations like that, which never occurred to me much before. Until I saw the “Good Christian Friends” thing and put it all together…

The hymnal… is gender neutral. 😮

MIND = BLOWN