I am not a fan of Christmas carols. In fact, you might say that Christmas carols bring out the Grinch in me (as if I need any help). There is, however, at least one Christmas carol to which I am partial.
I first heard Mary Had A Baby on Bruce Cockburn's Christmas album fifteen years ago. It is a good old-fashioned call-and-response spiritual and it always seems to put me into a good frame of mind, if not into a Christmas-like frame of mind.
It is also one of the few songs whose words I could remember in their entirety when I was in Tanzania last year. The girls at the orphanage I was volunteering at constantly sang, and they asked (or rather, demanded) that volunteers share songs with them.
Happily, the girls loved Mary Had A Baby as much as I did and we often sang the song together. They even created a little "choo choo train" dance for the part of the chorus that goes, "The people keep coming but the train has gone." Dancing is not something I normally associate with Christmas carols, but in this case it matched the joy of the music.
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