Minnesota poet and author Bill Holm reflects on singing Christmas songs in his Lutheran childhood, with memories of the cold, tin ears, and a favorite carol.

Segment includes Holm performing “Angels We Have Heard on High.”  

Transcript:

(00:00:00) But in my childhood on Christmas eve even the monotones do a tones or zero tones gave themselves permission to Bellow you are expected to sing the words are in front of you, you know, the tunes and besides the Peterson boys are whoever Blatt away an out-of-tune trumpets to drown you out. So for one night Make a Joyful Noise. My favorite Carol is a boy was Angels We Have Heard On High
(00:00:26) Angels We Have Heard On High singing sweetly through the night and the mountains in reply echoing their Brave Delight glory in eggshell. She stay Glory I shall see Stir
(00:01:04) It was French it was operatic. It was half in Latin just like the Catholics. It was not doers slow and full of blood and lamenting rather. It was full of angels singing Shepherds Jubilee and light even the mountains in reply echoing back there Brave. Delight and the chorus was not the standard Lutheran one note to one syllable sensible plotting but a glorious melisma of runs on the word Gloria which sounded up through Scandinavian throats not as a word at all, but a simple singing for the act of singing alone for the quivering in your own throat for the are moving up in a great column through your body from stomach to diaphragm to chest to throat to the bones of your face. And out out into the cold blustery Minnesota night like a tropical flower that said to hell with you all and bloomed in a snowdrift filling the air not with chased Frost but with heavy sensual perfume of bodies with black hair and black eyes and heads thrown back and scales rolling out with no words at all. Only the ah of Joy pleasure Delight now that was a him. But I was never so sure of the God's name who was there praised as the minister seemed to be the god that had that Gloria coming did not worry about crummy presence or getting ahead that God was not so afraid of the machine's going away that he trembled in the presence of the poor that God through open his mouth without squeamishness and let the sound come out into the universe the inward noise of that singing and those images of poverty in a cow barn. Arne without shame or ambition helped carry me through childhood with their power metaphors do that understood, right?