The embroidery design featuring this well-known Christmas carol was a problem right from the start. It wasn’t that it was difficult, far from it. The problem was that the design was wrong.
It showed three angels above a horizontal representation of part of Bethlehem. Some of the landscape colour was harvest gold which, even allowing for scholarly disagreement over the time of year of Jesus’s birth, seemed a bit incongruous. The domed buildings depicted were sophisticated and ultra-modern, more akin to space stations than the simple dwellings of the 1st century AD. But the real howler was the addition of crosses to three of these buildings. How could crosses representing the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ be in monumental use at the time of His birth ? In any case, historians have stated that the Cross was not used symbolically until the 6th century AD.
I re-drew the design on graph paper, changing the buildings to mainly the typical flat-topped houses of the Middle East, omitting the crosses, and making a few colour switches. I have now completed the second embroidered piece based on this design. I am still not entirely satisfied with it, but at least it looks more authentic now.
The Christmas carol “Hark, the herald angels sing” was written by Charles Wesley, brother of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, in 1739. Originally the words were slightly different, and it was sung to an assortment of tunes. The tune we know today was adapted from Mendelssohn’s Festgesang Cantata, composed in 1840 to commemmorate Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Charles Wesley preferred slow and solemn music for his hymns. This tune is dramatic, and the carol is often used as the finale in Christmas carol services. It has become familiar to millions of people worldwide, as it is the recessional hymn at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Kings College, Cambridge, a televised event with a huge following.
Tags: "Hark the herald angels sing", Angels, Bethlehem, Charles Wesley, Christmas carols, Felix Mendelssohn, Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols
