It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

The holidays let us wrap up the old year and get ready to start fresh with the new one. This is why holiday music always raises my spirits (with a few exceptions). I always find one song that particularly fits a year. In this chaotic and painful year, it’s “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.”

It was one of my favorite songs from my junior high and high school choirs. It has a hopeful message and a lovely melody. (I’m familiar with the US version. The UK and Commonwealth countries use a different melody.) Here’s a recent rendition of it.

And there’s the story behind the song. It was a poem written by Unitarian pastor Edmund Sears in 1849, which was also a tumultuous year. As Peter Hughes described it in an article for the Unitarian Universalist History & Heritage Society (UUHHS).

Writing during a period of personal melancholy, and with news of revolution in Europe and the United States’ war with Mexico fresh in his mind, Sears portrayed the world as dark, full of “sin and strife,” and not hearing the Christmas message:

And man, at war with man, hears not
The…