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Good morning. Tis the season for carol services! I’ve already been to two, and I’ve noticed the growing tendency to mix modern songs in with the old. At one service we sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and Baby It’s Cold Outside. Perhaps the organisers think we’re bored of the classics or that we might find them arcane – out of touch with modern life and manners. Well, I think they’re wrong. Classics endure because they are timeless, and though carols can be a little strange, their themes are profoundly relevant. One abiding image is snow – “snow on snow, in the bleak-midwinter, long, long ago”. This locates carols firmly in the imagination of the Victorian era, which was going through a mini-ice age – in stark contrast to the Middle East of the Nativity or the warmer planet of today. That said, we are currently experiencing a cold snap, and with the cost of fuel so high – many of our fellow Britons will be shivering. Poverty is central to the carol. In See Amid the Winter’s Snow – a melody that has been repurposed as a social protest song for coal miners and fishermen – we hear: “Lo, within a manger lies/ He who built the starry skies”. The point is that God humbled himself to be made man, a model of humility that we are encouraged to follow. Once in Royal David’s City advises: “Christian children all must be/ Mild, obedient, good as He”, which you might feel flies in the face of some modern parenting methods. The response to poverty is not indifference but action: Good King Wenceslas, upon seeing a poor man gathering fuel, is moved to go out into the bitter night to give him aid. He is accompanied by a page – who with obedience, that word again, follows his master’s footsteps. Carols drop dark hints about where the Christmas story will lead. The holly in “The Holly and the Ivy” evokes the crown of thorns placed on Christ’s head before his crucifixion; its berries are “as red as any blood.” Metaphors of death, including lambs that could well be sacrificed in the temple, are perhaps less shocking to an audience that has just been through Covid - for many of us are now more conscious of our inescapable mortality. One of my favourite carols is The Seven Joys of Mary. The sixth of these joys is Mary seeing her son die on the Cross, which you might find startling. But Christmas is only the first chapter in a story of hope – one that Christians believe culminates in death and glorious resurrection.