Michelle here.
A local radio station has been playing round-the-clock Christmas music for the past week, and one of my favorites is "A Soldier’s Silent Night," performed by Fr. Ted Berndt, a Catholic priest, former Marine, and Purple Heart recipient. Curious about the origins of the song, I did some searching on Google. There must have been some controversy over the poem’s authorship because the urban-legend debunker Snopes took on the case and verified the claim that it was written by a U.S. serviceman. The author is another former Marine, James M. Schmidt.
This part of the poem always makes me puddle up:
"I didn’t want to leave him so quiet in the night,
this guardian of honor so willing to fight.
But half asleep he rolled over, and in a voice clean and pure,
said ‘Carry on, Santa, it’s Christmas Day, all secure.’
One look at my watch and I knew he was right,
Merry Christmas my friend, Semper Fi and goodnight."
NOTE: I couldn’t find a recording of the performance for sale online. If you find it, please post a link in the combox. Thanks!
Howdy,
I work in radio here in Detroit, and we’ve been playing A Soldier’s Silent Night for a few years now. Beautiful poem, and we get a lot of requests for it.
One of the stations in the market posted both the lyrics and an MP3 of this on their website, and it is free to download. Visit http://wnic.com/pages/audio/soldiers_silent_night.mp3 to listen or download it.
Enjoy, and Merry Christmas!
Tim
PS- All Christmas music for only a week? These guys went all Christmas Nov. 1…
Nice Michelle! I’ve been listening to The Coast for weeks now (I think they start their all Christmas music right after thanksgiving) but I hadn’t heard that one.
In response to Tim’s comment, I’ve been listening to WNIC recently for the Christmas songs. I noticed that they will go back to their regular format (easy listening) on December 26! Alas. No “12 Days of Christmas”!
‘thann
Ruthann,
I don’t know if they still do it because I rarely listen to them anymore, but a few years ago my local Protestant radio station had a “12 Days of Christmas Music” which began 11 days BEFORE Christmas day.
Also, I know that Christian radio station 95.5 the Fish out of Cleveland typically ends their playing of Christmas music on the 26th.
So it’s not just the secular radio stations, unfortunately, that don’t appreciate that the 25th is merely the BEGINNING of the Christmas season. 🙁