Come and sing the Christmas story

Come and sing the Christmas story. Michael Arnold Perry* (1942-1996). This text was written on a Cornish beach in summer 1979 and first published three years later in HFTC. The author was then on holiday from his parish of Bitterne, Southampton, and engaged in much writing. He felt keenly that Christmas was often a lost opportunity in the churches, where sympathetic adult visitors were frequently confronted with childish, archaic or unintelligible carols; see his last book, Preparing for Worship (1995), p. 55. He also had a flair for providing familiar tunes with singable words carrying a clear Christian message; here the tune was the traditional Welsh AR HYD Y NOS (ALL THROUGH THE...