If there are people who do not enjoy singing Christmas carols, I do not know them.  When these traditional songs ring out at this time of year, everybody responds joyfully. Joining in the singing stirs young and old to feeling better about themselves and the world.

These impressions, admittedly altogether too sweeping for the world at large, flow from an experience that has become a ritual in my neighborhood. Together with other nearby residents, we have been gathering each year, for the last 23, at the home of George and Emily, our next-door neighbors, who host a party in celebration of the season. This event has taken hold among us so that we look forward to it with pleasure and find renewed reason each year to cherish it.

Before we sit down to dinner, Emily is wont to summon us around the piano where she leads us in song. A veteran voice teacher, she knows how to create an atmosphere where even frogs like me venture to sing. We belt out the carols with gusto, repeating the familiar words most of us have known for decades.

While singing myself, I take delight in scanning the faces of my fellow choristers. Just about everybody looks joyful, even those whom I know to have had heavy problems to bear. I take special note of neighbors who do not espouse the Christian faith but who nonetheless will sing about Jesus as the savior of the world. As I would do in their place, they allow themselves to be swept along by the beauty they find in traditions they do not themselves entirely share.

This annual experience is what makes me so upbeat about the singing of carols. All is not right with the world. This Christmas finds us in the usual turmoil and assaults on human dignity take place in just about every large area of our planet, a situation in which I feel no complacency.

But I make no excuse for taking pleasure in the celebration of one small gathering of friends and neighbors. It is a consolation to find ours a peaceable community where we greet one another with not only respect but affection. I like to think us gifted with some of the best that Christmas offers: peace, joy, enlightenment, and compassion.

It is these same gifts that Christmas songs at their best celebrate. The luster of the standard carols resides, not just in their beautiful melodies and evocative lyrics, but in their bearing the message of what Christmas means. Despite the way they are vulgarized in shopping malls and on the radio, “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World,” among many others, retain their power to make the heart peaceful and to rouse one’s spirits. Lesser known carols such as “Masters in This Hall,” set to an old French tune, and “Once In Royal David’s City,” have their distinct charms too and carry forward the same message.

No carol, however, will ever hit me with such force as did “Hodie Christus Natus Est” (Today Christ Is Born) on one memorable occasion. That was Christmas Eve 54 years ago when I was a newcomer seeking acceptance by the Jesuits. Along with other first-year novices I was asleep that long-ago evening, only to be suddenly awakened by the sound of angelic voices singing that Latin hymn. The singers were second-year novices, positioned in a loft above our dormitory from which vantage point they could most plausibly imitate angel choristers.

Recalling this scene amounts to an exercise in nostalgia over the course of five decades, I suppose, but to me its importance lies deeper. The carol in that setting evoked in me the magic of Christmas in its spiritual dimensions. Words and music transported me, for that night at least, into another sphere of human existence, life lived in God’s light.

That kind of experience does not come on demand, nor do I expect to have its like again. But some of it has rubbed off, I like to think. In later life I feel content with the spirituality I learned then and have since developed further. And I now place even greater value on family members (now more than ever an extended family), along with friends and neighbors.

This year I feel happy to celebrate my 75th Christmas with the people whom I regard as gifts given to me. They continue to wear well, I find, as the years proceed in ever more rapid succession. (Would that I may wear well for them.) I treasure Christmases past and hope I can look forward to those still to come.

Meanwhile, Christmas present suffices for me. I want its gifts to take further root in me. Peace, joy, love, compassion – these and others associated with this day seem to me more than ever worth aspiring to.

Richard Griffin