When the radio crackled out its first broadcast on Christmas Eve in 1906, listeners tuned in to the voice of Reginald Fessenden reading Luke 2– the birth of Christ– before he picked up his violin and played “O Holy Night.” Yes, that’s right. The first song played on the radio, after years of exclusively morse code, was a hymn depicting the birth of Jesus. The song was written in French as a poem originally by Placide Cappeau in 1843 and set to music by Adolphe Charles Adams for a Christmas Eve mass in 1847. Although the church accepted and loved the hymn at first, it was eventually banned after leadership found out that Adolphe was Jewish and Placide walked away from his faith. Eventually, about a decade later, the hymn would fall into the hands of an American minister, John Sullivan Dwight, who would change some of the lyrics to be the ones we know today.

Picture this: The world seems to hold its breath and is eerily still. The wind whips through cold, damp trenches as the minutes tick into the wee hours of the morning. The year is 1914 and you are a soldier in the army holding down the western front against the Germans in World War I. The war began earlier that year at the beginning of the summer, and has been relentless ever since. If you were crazy enough to poke your head out of the trench to look across No Man’s Land, the bodies laying out in the cold would be staggering– a fresh dusting of snow being their only burial shroud. You miss your family, your hometown, and your own warm bed. It almost seems like a lifetime away as you sit at the bottom of this trench, the soil packed hard and unforgiving. You count the days since you’ve been here when it occurs to you; it’s Christmas Eve.

Today, we begin with a laugh: Sam was scrolling through Twitter a few nights ago and started to chuckle. When I asked him what was so funny, he told me that someone asked via tweet, “Who is Harold Angel?” Of course, this person would be confusing Mr. Harold Angel with the opening line of the same Christmas hymn called, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” The lyrics were originally written by Charles Wesley as a poem and later put to music by George Whitfield in 1753, when the original first line– Hark, how the welkin (heaven) rings– was revised to what we know and love today. What strikes most historians about this hymn is the lyrics; not only are they theologically sound, but they are beautifully put. In three stanzas, this song presents the Gospel in a meaningful and succinct way, which is probably why it has stood the test of time– almost 300 years to be exact.

If you’ve been with me since the beginning of this little devotional site, you’ll know that every year, for five years, I’ve tackled the Christmas story in the weeks after Thanksgiving leading up to the big day. This year, I pondered how I could make my Christmas devotions different from what I’ve done in the past. So what is something about the Christmas season that can immediately put a person in the seasonal spirit? For me, before we put up the tree or bake the cookies, before we wrap the presents or decorate the house, we all do one thing: turn on Christmas music. To me, Christmas carols can instantly get me into the Christmas spirit, bring all my childhood memories to the forefront of my mind, and help me remember that our Savior, Jesus, came to be with us in the flesh.