Joy to the World

Christmas Carols Explained, #23

“An Englishman, an American, and a German(sorta) walk into a bar…”

We had a tradition growing up where we used to break out the Christmas decorations on Thanksgiving morning, set up the tree, and blast Mannheim Steamroller throughout the house. This was before I became the notorious stickler for defending Thanksgiving, and now my own tradition is to do this exact thing the day after Thanksgiving. Really I think my parents instituted this rule to keep us out of the kitchen while they put together a dozen dishes and pies and stuff. It worked.

While there are a lot of banger tracks on Mannheim’s albums, whenever I imagine putting a CD in and starting it up, “Joy to the World” is always the tune that hits first in my mind. So many renderings of this song are subdued and reverent by comparison, but come on, this is a song about real, unashamed, rock-solid joy. No, put the bottle down, Madame Vice President…

So while the Tabernacle Choir brings in their potent vocals and harmony, it’s the complete eruption of instruments from the starting line in Mannheim’s arrangement that does it for me.

The German(sorta) connection is potentially not true, so let’s tackle that first. George Frideric Handel, known for his opera Messiah, is alleged to have written a melody that later inspired American composer Lowell Mason in 1839. It’s not definitive as to whether Mason drew from Handel directly so we can’t say. Mason was writing the music explicitly for the words to “Joy to the World,” which were penned in 1719 by Isaac Watts, who was English. We gettin’ diverse up in here.

While many of these Christmas hymns are about the Nativity and the Birth of Christ, this one isn’t limited to this event or that year. It’s about the coming of Christ in general, the long-awaited fulfillment of that divine promise that God would send a Savior, and through Him we’d have a way back from our sins and shortcomings.

The Scriptures often depict redemption and forgiveness as something you can achieve at the end of a painful road, we should remember that being redeemed and saved is something worth celebrating. Pain can certainly be involved in the process (and most likely will be). But it’s not the objective.

To my non-Latter-day Saint readers, I’ll share one of our Scriptures that you might not have heard before:

“Adam fell, that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.” (2 Nephi 2: 25, Book of Mormon)

Our celebration of Christ and Christmas can and should be a solemn thing, but let’s also remember that it should be a joyous thing.