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The House of Christmas (Chesterton​/​Hadaway)

from Dancing Day: songs for Christmas and Yule by Merry Hadaway

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about

I was already very much in love with some of Chesterton's poetry having come across "The Christ-Child Lay" (track 4!), but "The House of Christmas" absolutely enchanted me, with its yearning, passionate beauty and characteristic, heartfelt and sparkling imagery.

There's a lot that Chesterton and I would have disagreed intensely about, and a few of his views were outright appalling. But his compassion, his good nature and his insistence on recognising the vulnerable humanity of all shine through a lot of his writings, and make his voice, I think, still one that needs desperately to be heard. "The House of Christmas" places at its centre the homeless, impoverished baby, who is also God. Which is, for me, the heart of what Christianity is and should be. Also, he uses the image of a "fire drake" in a poem about Christmas. What's not to love. ;-)

The tune for this song came remarkably quickly. A little disturbingly so, so that it felt more like a memory than creation. The first two lines of poetry whose tune became fixed in my mind were that couplet that in the first verse reads, "The crazy stable close at hand/With shaking timber and shifting sand". Everything else sprang from there.

lyrics

There fared a mother driven forth,
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the Yule tale was begun.

A child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - - - how long ago!
In a place no chart no ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

The world is as wild as an old wife's tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where crashed and thundered unthinkable winds
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller tower than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

credits

from Dancing Day: songs for Christmas and Yule, released December 6, 2014

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about

Merry Hadaway image

Merry Hadaway Stonehaven, UK

Folk singer, ukulele player and songwriter. Queer, disabled, trans, Christo-Pagan, powered by waves and mountains. :-)

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