Today has been wild with gales and heavy showers with no chance of getting any photos of the sunrise or sunset on this winter Solstice day.  Tonight it is not a still night as the wind roars through the trees and rain batters on the window and seems very different from the image conjured up in the popular carol. ‘Stille Nacht.’
1.Still the night, holy the night!
Sleeps the world; hid from sight,
Mary and Joseph in stable bare
watch o'er the child belovèd and fair,
sleeping in heavenly rest,
sleeping in heavenly rest.
2 Still the night, holy the night!
Shepherds first saw the light,
heard resounding clear and long,
far and near, the angel-song,
'Christ the Redeemer is here!'
'Christ the Redeemer is here!'
3 Still the night, holy the night!
Son of God, O how bright
love is smiling from thy face!
Strikes for us now the hour of grace,
Saviour, since thou art born!
Saviour, since thou art born
It was first performed as a result of the organ in a church in Austria being damaged by mice in 1818.  The priest. Joseph Mohr, was worried that it could not be repaired before the Christmas Eve service.  He remembered a poem that he had written a few years before so asked a local organist, Franz Gruber, to compose simple music for it.  That night the two men sang ‘Stille Nacht’ for the first time at the church’s Christmas Mass, while Mohr played a guitar and the choir repeated the last two lines of each verse.
Since then it was spread by folk singers and in 1839 performed in New York and the carol was sung simultaneously by English and German troops as they played football together during the brief Christmas truce of 1914 in WW1.   It has now been translated into over 300 languages and dialects and is probably the world’s most popular carol.

Carol 6