The House of Christmas comes from a series of four carols, including three settings of poems by G.K. Chesterton.

Duration: 3 mins 40s.

G. K. Chesterton was a great traveller and on his wanderings a friend to everyone he met. In his own house, he was famed for his warmth and hospitality. It is not surprising, then that The Inn was for him almost a spiritual symbol. In all of my settings of his poems I have tried to convey the sense of a yearning journey of life coupled with the joy of finding something thought lost forever: we travel to a place that, if we are truthful, we never really left.

The idea at the centre of The House of Christmas that I dramatise is Chesterton’s: that joy is a ‘gigantic secret’ which resides at the end of all our travelling.

A four track EP of new christmas carols is now released on Air Edel Records. It features SATB settings of three texts by GK Chesterton (The House of Christmas, The Wise Men, A Child of the Snows) and a new setting of the 16th Century Scottish carol Balulalow. The carols, each receiving their first public performances during December 2016 are produced and mixed by Abbey Road engineer Jonathan Allen and performed by a virtuoso quartet of Eloise Irving, Amy Lyddon, Benedict Hymas and Simon Whiteley, accompanied by pianist Mark Dowd. The EP is available across a number of digital platforms including iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify!

Text

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

Part of our series: “The House of Christmas”.