Carol our Christmas

Carol our Christmas. Shirley Erena Murray* (1931-2020). Written in 1986 as a reaction to Northern hemisphere carols and their imagery of holly and snow which dominated New Zealand Christmas celebrations well into the 20th century, despite the fact that New Zealanders actually celebrate the festival in high summer. This carol joyfully plays with the term ‘Antipodean’, offering itself as an ‘Up-side-down’ vision of Christmas where snow is not falling and trees are not bare, a time when the Christ Child may be ‘warm in our sunshine and sweetness of air’. It was first published in Colin Gibson*’s Singing Love (1988), where it is set to his melody REVERSI (named after a popular game in which...