Ten Great Middle Verse Christmas Lyrics

I love Christmas carols.  Many of us know the first verse of Christmas songs by heart, as we have sung them since we were children and hear them ubiquitously in the weeks after Thanksgiving.  But many of these songs have incredible middle verses that we aren't very familiar with, that only get sung on Christmas Eve (if ever).  So I am posting this as a tribute to all the beautiful written, theologically rich middle verses to Christmas hymns that often get buried.  Please post your favorites as well!  (p.s.  Last year, I wrote my thoughts on Advent - many of these verses reflect the same sentiments as my post.)

Listed in random order:

O come, Thou Day-Spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death's dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
(Oh Come Emmanuel)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Truly He taught us to love one another

His law is love and His gospel is peace

Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother

And in His name all oppression shall cease

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,

Let all within us praise His holy name

(Oh Holy Night)

---------------------------------------------------------

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.
(Joy to the World)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mild He lays His glory by

Born that man no more may die

Born to raise the sons of earth

Born to give them second birth

Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see

Hail the incarnate Deity

Pleased as man with men to dwell

Jesus, our Immanuel

Pleased as man with men to dwell

Jesus, our Immanuel

(Hark the Herald Angels Sing)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the heavenly strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The tidings which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing! 

O ye, beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
O rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing!

For lo! the days are hastening on,
By prophets seen of old,
When with the ever-circling years
Shall come the time foretold,
When peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And the whole world give back the song
Which now the angels sing.

(It Came Upon a Midnight Clear)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Born your people to deliver, 

Born a child and yet a king;

Born to reign in us forever, 

Now your gracious kingdom bring. 

By your own eternal Spirit 

Rule in all our hearts alone;

By your all-sufficient merit 

Raise us to your glorious throne.

(Come O Long Expected Jesus)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And in despair I bowed my head

"There is no peace on earth," I said,

"For hate is strong and mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good will to men."

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The wrong shall fail, the right prevail

With peace on earth, good will to men."

(I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How silently, how silently,

The wondrous Gift is given!

So God imparts to human hearts

The blessings of His heaven.

No ear may hear His coming,

But in this world of sin,

Where meek souls will receive Him still,

The dear Christ enters in.

(O Little Town of Bethlehem)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Good Christian men, rejoice,
With heart and soul, and voice;
Now ye hear of endless bliss:
Jesus Christ was born for this!
He hath oped the heavenly door,
And man is blessed evermore.
Christ was born for this!
Christ was born for this!

(Good Christian Men Rejoice)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shepherds, in the fields abiding,
Watching o'er your flocks by night,
God with man is now residing,
Yonder shines the infant Light;
Come and worship,
Come and worship,
Worship Christ, the newborn King!

(Angels from the Realms of Glory)

On Bill Bryson's Short History of Private Life

 I just read Bill Bryson's "At Home: A History of Private Life".  Bryson provides a concise history of domestic life by moving through each room of the house and explaining the history of items and concepts related to that room.  (So in the kitchen, you learn about why salt and pepper are our staple spices; in the bathroom, you learn about the history of hygeine and sewage; etc.)  If that description sounds compelling, you will probably love the book; if it sounds dull or hokey, you will probably hate the book.

I fall in the "love it" camp, although I admittedly skimmed some of the chapters in order to get the book back to the library in time.  (This book is probably best read a few chapters at a time, with breaks in between to read other types of books, so that you don't get information overload.)  Here were my favorite parts:

Perspective -- This is my favorite thing to take away from historical non-fiction books, and this book is loaded with facts that provide perspective on where we are now, how we got there, and how it could be different (and almost always, worse).  Perspective can come in a number of forms:

Only loosely related to my "perspective" section, but funny.

• How good we have it now -- We have indoor plumbing, electricity, and appliances that automate our hardest chores.  We have the option to keep our houses comfortably warm in the winter and comfortably cool in the summer.  We have abundant food and clothing, and on top of that, most of us have tons of extra stuff to make our houses more beautiful, personalized, and fun (or sometimes, just more full of boxes).  
• How it's easy to see what doesn't make sense about a different time and place, while it's much harder to see the silliness in your own culture - Bryson describes notable past fashion trends (women wearing their hair in 2 foot poofs that would sometimes catch fire), time intensive and dangerous working schedules (including 4 year olds working as chimney sweeps!), and changed social attitudes on parenting, sex, hygeine (bathing once a year or less?!), and all kinds of other things.  These things seem so obviously non-optimal now - it's interesting to think about what cultural blinders we have to the crazy that's happening in our own time and place.
• How some things are much older than we might imagine - cave men wore shoes that rival modern hiking boots in comfort and grip.  
• While other things are very recent -- forget about being totally up to date - the concept of being "comfortable" in your home is only about 200 years old.  Before that, you couldn't expect to have room temperature warmth, or keep out all the elements perfectly, or have really desirable sleeping and sitting arrangements.  
• How people don't feel jealousy or envy or longing for a thing until they realize it exists -- Even the richest households had to keep themselves entertained by candlelight at night until electricity was invented.  No one minded gathering around the candlelight for knitting, reading, and playing cards, because no one imagined an alternative.  But now that we have electricity, you would be hard pressed to find an American household that ever spends an evening like this, except maybe in a storm or for a designated "turn off technology" night.  

Context --New parents-to-be who research labor and delivery methods will learn about the possibility of home birth.  In support of home birth, you might read the "supporting" fact that the vast majority of babies throughout history and in other cultures are born at home, with the implication that because most people have done childbirth this way, it's the most natural and best way.  The fact that the overwhelming majority of births happened at home is true, but it is significantly contextualized by these statistics:  a woman's odds of dying during one of her childbirths used to be 1 in 8, and 1 in 4 babies died in their first year.  Another labor and delivery procedure that often gets described unfairly:  C-sections.  While it might be true that they get utilized more often than they should (I haven't done any research on this), it's also important to remember that they provide an enormous service.  Before C-sections (and before surgery was a safe option in general), if babies got stuck, women would just continue to labor (sometimes for up to THREE WEEKS) until either the mother or baby gave out.  People didn't do hospital births or C-sections throughout most of history because it wasn't an option, or they couldn't afford it, or because until very, very recently (like when doctors learned about germ theory and anesthesia, which happened less than 200 years ago), there was nothing doctors could do to make things better and a lot they could do to make things worse.  I am so glad that we now have hospitals available, with knowledgeable doctors and modern medicine and much safer options for labor and delivery.  (To be fair, home birth is a lot safer than it used to be as well, thanks to modern medicine -- but this section is intended to be a defense of hospital births.)

Right Person in the Right Place at the Right Time and it Changed the Course of History moments -- If you like this framing of historical events, this book is chock full of those kind of facts.  For example:  a man named Canvass White invented hydraulic cement in the 1820s, which allowed the Erie Canal to be constructed and goods to be shipped efficiently from New York to the rest of the country, which transformed Manhattan from an obscure town of 10,000 to a major economic center of half a million people in less than 50 years.  It also gave America a major advantage over Canada at a time when it was still an open question who would be the economically dominant country in North America.  While I think this type of thing can be overdone (negating the possibility that someone else could've discovered the same thing soon after, or some other clever way to do the thing could have been worked out), it's fun to imagine an alternative world where, were it not for that one person in that one place at that one time, New York City could be a tiny town of no importance, or Canada could be the world power to be reckoned with.