As a songwriter and a storyteller, I suppose it was inevitable that someday I would tell the Christmas story in song. In other words . . . write a Christmas carol. Thus came to be The First Christmas Eve.
When I started to work on the Carol--it was in the 1970s in Vermont--it occurred to me that the Christmas story was mostly what happened the night before the birth of Jesus. The trek to Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph getting turned away from lodgings, settling in the manger, the star, the wise men . . . all of that was on the night before the birth of Jesus . . . on The First Christmas Eve. I had the title of the carol! Even though I was a guitar player, I sat at the piano and went to work. When the song was finished, I recorded it in a small studio with my first wife, Linda Johnson, who had a stunningly beautiful voice, doing the vocal with my friend, Bob Clark playing bowed bass. I was on guitar.
Many people have enjoyed my carol over the years but it has never found a place in the standard lexicon of Christmas music. I am not a very good self-promoter. It is not as if I haven't tried. I exposed the song every chance I got, and I continue to do that.
In the 90s I started writing for Children. I achieved minor fame in Alabama
with a book (and sequel) called Picker McClikker, about a little boy who could pick things faster than anyone (He saved the family cotton crop when a storm was coming.) After writing about Picker, I was emboldened to try my hand at a chapter book (a rudimentary novel meant to be read aloud to first second and third graders.) This little book was a "stocking stuffer" called The Christmas Tree Express about a family that had a Christmas tree farm, a train that hauled the trees, a boy, a girl and an Alaskan malamute called Silver. I included the lyrics to my carol in this book.
Much later, in 2013 I completed my Blackwater Novel series and again included the lyrics of The First Christmas Eve in the third and final book in the trilogy. I combined the carol with an event that happened to me when I was in the fourth grade.
At the time, in 1944, we had a wonderful music teacher we called Miss Third Grade Brown (to differentiate her from Mrs. Seventh Grade Brown!). She got us singing some wonderful and rather difficult carols--The Twelve Days of Christmas and The Carol of the Bells, for example--in preparation for a Christmas concert we performed in a little church in the village of Mountain Brook, Alabama. Singing that wonderful Christmas music with my classmates by candle light in that little church was one of the highpoints of my boyhood. I ended the last book of the Blackwater trilogy with a description of that concert and with the lyrics for The First Christmas Eve.
My favorite lines in The First Christmas Eve are these:
Then in a stable in Bethlehem
A setting so plain for the perfect gem . . . and;
Every hope for every babe
And each shining star we believe
Every deed of love and comfort
Honors The First Christmas Eve.
And it is with those sentiments, dear reader, that I close and wish you a wonderful Christmas and enjoyment of my carol, The First Christmas Eve.
