Christmas is three days away! I am going to divert from my normal marketing blog and focus on the Christmas season. What gets you in the "spirit” of Christmas? I have asked several friends. For some, it is the lights hung on trees and houses and just about anything that can be wrapped with a string of lights. It is a season of lights! For others, it is the shopping experience. Stores are jammed with shoppers and the crush of people buying presents does it for them. That is not me… I prefer to get in and out of stores. (I’m not sure how that works with more and more online shopping.) For others, it is a certain Christmas movie or TV special that comes around this time of the year. For me, it is the music. I like the classics: Burl Ives singing Have a Holly Jolly Christmas; Elvis’ version of Blue Christmas; Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas. However, there is one song that always turns me directly towards the heart of Christmas: Silent Night!

Silent Night is one of the most beloved and recorded songs of all time. Bing Crosby’s version of the song, recorded in 1935, is the third best selling single of all time, selling 30 million copies. Think of all the popular music that has been recorded in the past 80 years and this song still sits at number 3 all time! It is often called the most popular of all Christmas carols. However, this classic Christmas tune nearly never came to be.

In 1818, Josef Mohr, an associate priest at St. Nicholas Parish in Oberndorf, Austria, was preparing for a Christmas Eve service. The night before the service, he discovered that the church organ was not functioning and he needed music for his choir to sing in the service. While scrambling to think what he could do, he remembered a Christmas poem he had written two years earlier. The next day, he took the poem to the home of church organist, Franz Gruber. He told Gruber his dilemma and asked if the organist could compose a melody for his lyrics that could be played on guitar instead of the organ. Gruber took Mohr’s challenge and, just hours before the Christmas Eve service, he composed the music. That evening, Mohr and Gruber taught the song: Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht! (Silent Night! Holy Night!) to their choir members and it was performed publicly for the first time a short time later at the St. Nicholas church.

That would have been the end of the story had it not been for the man who came to work on the church organ. Karl Mauracher was an organ builder. When he arrived in Oberndorf to repair the organ at St. Nicholas, he had Franz Gruber play the instrument to make sure it was working satisfactorily. Gruber played Silent Night and Mauracher was enchanted with the tune. He asked if he could have a copy of the music and the lyrics, which Gruber gladly obliged. Mauracher took the music back home, where he played it for two traveling family of singers - the Rainer Family Singers and the Strasser Sisters. Both groups used the song in their Christmas concerts. It was 16 years later, in 1834, the king of Prussia heard the Strasser Sisters singing the song and fell in love with it. He insisted it be added to the repertoire of the choir in the Prussian National Cathedral and be performed every Christmas thereafter.

In 1838, the Rainer Family Singers came to America and performed the song in German outside of Trinity Church in New York City. The simple melody drew a crowd and people wanted to hear it again and again. Silent Night continued to grow in popularity every Christmas. The English version of Silent Night that we know came about 20 years later when an Episcopal priest named John Young, who was then serving at New York Trinity Church, translated Mohr’s lyrics and consolidated six verses into three. Since then, Silent Night has been translated and sung in over 300 languages.