Choosing Songlists: Christmas Vs Advent?
It seems every year that I come across the same delimma when choosing songs for this season. It stems from the fact that what the stores and media call the Christmas season is, for our church, Advent, or the 4 Sundays immediately before Christmas Eve. Most of the traditional carols that people expect to hear, that are coming over the store intercom systems, are the songs that tell of Christ’s birth like Silent Night, Away in a Manger, and O Little Town of Bethlehem. However during that time we really should be singing songs that talk about the anticipation of Christ’s coming like O Come O Come Emmanuel.
This year we tried to at least not give in to the carols until the 3rd Sunday of Advent. Up until then I kept doing mostly our regular worship songs. I like worship songs that hint at or lead us to Christmas like “Here I Am to Worship.”
Light of the world
You stepped down into darkness.
Opened my eyes, let me see.
Beauty that made this heart adore You
Hope of a life spent with You
The third week we did our Sunday of all Christmas music. We had the children’s choirs, liturgical dancers, special soloists and Christmas songs. Our list included Christmas Eve Sarajevo with the dancers, Born in Bethlehem by Third Day with the kids singing the first verse, O Come All Ye Faithful, What I Want for Christmas, Welcome to Our World, Christmas Time is Here, and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.
So here are my questions. Do you not worry about liturgical seasons and just sing all the carols you can in December? What songs did you do during this season? What songs did you do during advent?
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I think that it will always be a tough choice for worship leaders to choose what is wanted/expected or what should really be there. My bet is that many church members don’t realize how much thought goes into selecting music, scriptures, and any other parts of worship- I never fully understood how deliberate it was until I started going to our worship planning meetings. Good thoughts. Curious to see what other people do in this situation.
I echo Russ’s comments. Coming from a more evangelical (non-liturgical) tradition, I’ve kind of gotten a crash-course in the timing of the church calendar. It was pointed out to me by a former Methodist pastor that there are days where we celebrate (Christmas, Easter, etc.) and there are days where we anticipate. However, I honestly think a lot of this is lost on our congregation members because it’s been done so long as tradition that much of it has never been explained by pastors or worship leaders. Our contemporary service is about half normal Christmas carols (with no attention to advent vs. Christmas) and half regular songs, but our worship team for that service isn’t necessarily mindful of the liturgy the way our worship planning team is for our traditional service. In the youth department, we stick to the basic songs our worship band can do since Christmas carols tend to be difficult and can be a lot of effort for just a few performances.