Happy (almost) Christmas!

Something that has kept cropping up for me in the lead-up to Christmas: Everything is a remix 

(For much more on this, see Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. Quick summary in The Atlantic: “Steal Like an Artist: Creativity in the Age of the Remix”)

If this is true, Christmas must be a remix.

So many of our Christmas carols are medieval texts. Some, we’ve given new tunes. Or even when they have old ones, we adapt, we embellish, we arrange. 

We especially love these kinds of remixes. A killer reharmonization. A stunning descant. “The chord.”

Words get translated back and forth. The mystery requires other languages and sounds to break into our vernacular.

Melodies from all lands take flight to every other, and are gratefully received and remixed there. When you find yourself humming your favorite carol, you have become an active part of the remix, too. 

And this is to say nothing of the people making the music and performance itself. We have all changed in many ways since last Christmas. We have all been transformed by this journey. We all do our remixing in community. 

Performance itself is a kind of remix, a kind of transformation. The best laid plans have to adapt. The last-minute choice can change everything. Real music lives in the present; incarnation made manifest.

Once Christmas begins, we find ourselves remixing with faithful worshippers who come every week and those who have come for the first time in many years. And if we’re lucky, we will find ourselves fully in the moment.

When we lose ourselves in this way, we find everything we hold dear: art, prayer, love. 

If Jesus was begotten “of the Father’s love,” maybe that’s what all this remixing is about: the same impulse of divine creativity echoes in us.

And while the remix makes everything new, it also keeps everything the same as it was in the beginning. “He is Alpha and Omega,/ he the source, the ending he.”

Therefore, let us delight in the remix that is Christmas.

Merry Christmas!
-David