When the old songs tied death to Christmas, they had good source material. I like the old King James translation of Isaiah 9, one of the clearest predictions of Christ’s coming: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined” (Isa. 9:2).

The light of Christ shines brightest where death casts its shadow. We don’t have to protect our Christmas celebrations from our fears, our frustrations, or our sorrows. So look closely at the truth.

In my experience, if you click on a holiday favorites playlist, you’re asking for mental and emotional whiplash.

With little warning and no explanation, you’ll jump back and forth from “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” to “Silent Night,” from “Blue Christmas” to “Joy to the World,” from “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” to “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.”

Christmas in American culture is a mishmash of distinctly Christian content and all sorts of accumulated traditions. I, for one, am mostly fine with that. But I do wonder if you’ve noticed one particular difference between old Christian carols and more recent popular songs. The old songs often refer to death. The new ones rarely do.

DEATH IN CHRISTMAS SONGS

Consider just a few examples:

O Come, O Come Emmanuel: “From depths of hell thy people save and give them victory o’er the grave. Disperse the gloomy clouds of night and death’s dark shadows put to flight.”

Hark, the Herald Angels Sing: “Light and life to all he brings, ris’n with healing in his wings. Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die.”

Good Christian Men, Rejoice: “Now ye need not fear the grave: Peace! Peace! Jesus Christ was born to save.”

Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming: “This Flower, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air, dispels with glorious splendor the darkness everywhere. True man, yet very God, from sin and death he saves us and lightens every load.”

To celebrate Christmas, these old writers emphasized death. Their celebrations didn’t make sense without it. Today, to celebrate Christmas we avoid death altogether. Our celebrations can’t survive its challenge.

UNFAMILIAR DEATH

These differences in their songs and ours reflect major cultural shifts. Those old songs belong to places where death was visible everywhere. They didn’t have the freedom many of us have to avoid the subject.

In America at the end of the 18th century, four out of five people died before the age of 70. Average life expectancy was late 30s. Now the average is nearly 80 years old. Back then most people died where they lived—in their homes, surrounded by their families and friends and neighbors. By 1980, only 17 percent of deaths occurred in the home, though that number is on the rise again, thanks to hospice care. The experience of death has shifted from a familiar event in a familiar place to an unfamiliar event in a sanitized, professionalized institution most people rarely visit.

And it’s not just that the experience of death has grown less familiar. The subject of death has also become taboo, often banished from polite conversation. Historian Philippe Aries calls this shift a “brutal revolution”: that death, “so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden” (85).

Why suppress talk about death? Aries argues this taboo comes from our viewing happiness as a kind of moral duty. We act as if we have a “social obligation to contribute to the collective happiness by avoiding any cause for sadness or boredom, by appearing to be always happy, even if in the depths of despair.” If happiness is a moral duty, grief is a moral failure. “By showing the least sign of sadness, one sins against happiness, threatens it, and society then risks losing its raison d’etre,”

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