JOY TO THE WORLD

Christmas was not celebrated as it is today by seventeenth and eighteenth-century colonists.  See my post last year about Advent http://colonialquills.blogspot.com/search/label/Advent

Christmas was primarily a religious period lasting from Advent through Epiphany, without many other festivities. Hymns were sung in some churches, and a fair number of them were being written by the young literary genius, Isaac Watts. Watts, born in Southampton, England in 1674, was the son of a committed religious Nonconformist who had been jailed for his questionable philosophy.

Isaac Watts

By the age of thirteen, Isaac had learned Latin, Greek French and Hebrew, and later studied philosophy and theology. While still a teenager, Watts became critical of the way Psalms were sung in church so his father challenged him to improve the quality of church music by creating his own.

The following Sunday Isaac wrote his first hymn and it was accepted at church with great enthusiasm. He continued to produce a hymn each week for the next two years, and in 1707 he published Hymns and Spiritual Songs. That book and the hymnal he wrote in 1719 were considered the first real hymnals in the English language. With his 600 hymns he became known as the “Father of English Hymnody”.

George Frederick Handel

George Frederick Handel, a friend of Watts, is credited as being the music composer of “Joy To The World”. Handel is best known as the composer of “The Messiah”, which he wrote in just 25 days. These two gifted musical talents were very different in looks and personality. Watts was a plain, diminutive, mild mannered Englishman, while Handel was a vigorous, hot-tempered German. 

“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”                                       Luke 2:10 KJV

"Joy to the World," is often sung at Christmas celebrating Jesus Christ’s first coming, but in actuality it is a hymn that also anticipates, with great joy, Christ's triumphant return at the end of the age. This cherished Christmas carol is probably the most famous of Isaac Watts’ hymns.

The hymn is based upon the last part of Psalm 98.

“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.

Sing unto the Lord with the harp; with the harp, and the voice of a psalm.

With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the Lord, the King.

Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful together

Before the Lord; for he cometh to judge the earth: with righteousness shall he judge the world, and the people with equity.”

                                Psalm 98: 4-9 KJV

JOY TO THE WORLD

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

Let earth receive her King;

Let every heart prepare Him room,

And Heaven and nature sing,

And Heaven and nature sing,

And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.

Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns!

Let men their songs employ;

While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains

Repeat the sounding joy,

Repeat the sounding joy,

Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,

Nor thorns infest the ground;

He comes to make His blessings flow

Far as the curse is found,

Far as the curse is found,

Far as, far as, the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,

And makes the nations prove

The glories of His righteousness,

And wonders of His love,

And wonders of His love,

And wonders, wonders, of His love.

To listen to the music:

http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/j/o/joyworld.htm

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Janet Grunst

http://JanetGrunst.com
http://colonialquills.blogspot.com/
Represented By Linda S. Glaz
Hartline Literary Agency

Colonial Cradles

Hush! my dear, lie still and slumber,

Holy angels guard thy bed!

Heavenly blessings without number

Gently falling on thy head.

Sleep, my babe; thy food and raiment,

House and home, thy friends provide;

All without thy care or payment:

All thy wants are well supplied.

— From “A Cradle Hymn” by Isaac Watts (1674 – 1748)

The first time I saw a colonial cradle, I was visiting the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne in Concord, Massachusetts.

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne Home, Concord, MA

I was just a young girl and I can still see the rich, dark wood, so smoothly crafted with loving care. I remember imagining the children of the household that were rocked to sleep within the comforting confines. Seeing that cradle brought to life tender traces of the love and care of the people who had lived there. I cherished that memory long into adulthood, when I named my own son “Nathaniel.” And I still eagerly drink in the images of antique cradles wherever I see them.

Peregrine White's Wicker Cradle

The first cradle in America came over on the Mayflower in 1620. It was the Dutch wicker bed that soothed the first child born to the Pilgrims in the New World: Peregrine White. The young boy was birthed onboard the wooden vessel as it docked in Cape Cod Bay. It can still be seen at the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Most of the cradles made in the colonies were wrought from wood and the designs ranged from plain, solid boards, to engraved embellishments along the panels, to spindled sides similar to modern crib designs.

Author Eric Sloan in American Yesterday wrote, “At one time or another, cradles have been attached to butter churns, turnspits, dog mills, and even windmill gears to give them automatic movement, but the simple rocker cradle remained in the American household for over two centuries before its disappearance.”

A rather unique cradle, thought to have multiple uses for nursing mothers, twins or invalids, was the “adult cradle.” These wooden cradles were about the size of a single bed, but built closer to the floor.

According to Jack Larkin in The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790 – 1840, not every infant slept in a cradle in Early America. “…it was common, noted the physician and reformer William Alcott in 1830, for an American mother to ‘sleep with her infant on her arm,’ and children often shared the parental bed until they were weaned.”

Cradle from Storrowton Village Museum

But whether some infants shared their parents’ bed or not, the cradle seemed to be the predominant shelter for little ones while they slept.

Shirley Glubock in Home and Child Life in Colonial Days writes:

“Nothing could be prettier than the old cradles that have survived successive years of use with many generations of babies….In these cradles the colonial baby slept, warmly wrapped in a homespun blanket or pressed quilt.”

How much better thou’rt attended

Than the Son of God could be,

When from heaven he descended

And became a child like thee!

Soft and easy is thy cradle:

Coarse and hard thy Savior lay

When His birthplace was a stable

And His softest bed was hay.

— From “A Cradle Hymn” by Isaac Watts (1674 – 1748)