Do you hear what I hear?

By accident I started a subscription to St. Anthony's Messenger, a Franciscan publication that highlights wonderful things happening in faith.

This past month's issue included an article on the song "Do you hear what I hear?" most popularly sung by Bing Crosby.

It tells how the song was not just meant as a Christmas song but was written as a call for peace:

Many people mistakenly assume this Christmas classic has been around for years and that it is of European origin. But it was written in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis as a powerful plea for peace by a man who had experienced the horrors of war. . . . Of all their works, that simple Christmas song is the one that will continue to be treasured. Here is how it came to be: In October 1962, the Soviet Union and the United States were involved in a crisis centered on missiles the Russians had installed in Cuba. The United States threatened military action if the missiles were not removed. The world trembled and prayed as these two nuclear powers stood eyeball-to-eyeball. That October, as Noel Regney walked through the streets of New York, a sense of despair was in the air. No one smiled. Regney had endured the horrors of war. He knew the fear and terror of being close to death. The safe and secure life he had built for himself in the United States was on the verge of ending. Christmas, which was supposed to be a time of peace and goodwill, was approaching. Noel Regney had been asked by a record producer to write a holiday song. "I had thought I'd never write a Christmas song," he recalled. "Christmas had become so commercial. But this was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the studio, the producer was listening to the radio to see if we had been obliterated. "En route to my home, I saw two mothers with their babies in strollers. The little angels were looking at each other and smiling. All of a sudden, my mood was extraordinary." A glimpse of these babies filled Noel Regney's heart with poetry. The little ones reminded him of newborn lambs. Thus, the song begins, "Said the night wind to the little lamb...." As soon as Noel arrived home, he jotted down the lyrics. Then he asked Gloria to write the music to accompany his words. "While walking down the street in New York, my mother heard trumpets playing the melody in her head," explains Gabrielle Regney. . . . There have been over 100 versions of "Do You Hear What I Hear�" including early recordings by Perry Como and the Harry Simeone Chorale. Gladys Knight and the Pips, Destiny's Child and Vanessa Williams are among the artists who have made more recent recordings. Noel Regney's personal favorite was a recording by Robert Goulet, who nearly shouted out the line, "Pray for peace, people, everywhere." But it was the Bing Crosby 1963 recording that brought Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne's song of peace to the nation's attention. In those days, Crosby's recordings were often instant hits; his version sold more than a million copies. "Do You Hear What I Hear?" carried a beautiful message close to people in all walks of life. It became a popular Christmas carol, "a song high above the tree, with a voice as big as the sea." But the message of peace was lost on many people. "I am amazed that people can think they know the song and not know it is a prayer for peace," Noel Regney once told an interviewer. "But we are so bombarded by sounds and our attention spans are so short." Let us hope and pray that, when it is sung in churches worldwide during the Christmas season, this song of peace will remind us that "The Child, The Child sleeping in the night" came to "bring us goodness and light."