Let Every Heart Sing Part 1

Christmas for Cowboys

I hope everyone reading this had a blessed Thanksgiving. I love the week after Thanksgiving, partly because our family enjoys eating turkey leftovers just as much as the Thanksgiving feast itself, and because after Thanksgiving, the rest of the family finally deems it socially acceptable to sing Christmas songs with me. Did I mention I love Christmas music?

Now I will concede there are a lot of bad Christmas songs, or at least songs that are overplayed—Moriah Carrie’s All I Want for Christmas is you—and if it were up to me Santa Baby would be banned. But while in general I think Christmas should stay focused on Christ, I will be the first to admit the Christmas season wouldn’t be complete without hearing I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas, or the dark humor of Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. But my favorite songs are the sacred songs, especially the songs recorded by choirs because they capture the heavenly peace that is supposed to define this time of year. I love the standard carols for which everyone knows the words: Silent Night, Away in a Manger, Joy to the World. But for this series, I wanted to highlight some beautiful songs that some of you may not have heard that I believe really capture the true spirit that is supposed to define Christmas. In a subtle, beautiful way, they speak out against Christian Nationalism, and beckon us to live counterculturally.

In light of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, traditions that commercialize the Christmas season, Christmas for Cowboys, sung by John Denver stands out for me. Some of you might find this a strange choice to kick this series off, especially because it is not technically a religious song. But I wanted to highlight this song because when I was a child and Mom would play the album with this song on it, it was probably my least favorite song on the album. As a child, I thought it was a sad song, and it felt so out of place alongside most of his other songs which were joyful. He had another sad song told from the viewpoint of a child whose father drank too much every Christmas, and I wasn’t fond of this song either, but it is a sad reality some people live with every Christmas, and as an adult, I appreciate the candor of songs like this.

But Christmas for Cowboys isn’t really a sad song. In one sense, it is sad because the cowboys are away from their families on Christmas, driving cattle across the plains. Westerns can romanticize the life of the cowboy, but cowboys didn’t drive their cattle across the plains for fun: They made their living driving the cattle they raised across the plains and into the city where they were sold. I have heard it said that truck drivers are the modern equivalent to cowboys, and unfortunately, they often have to work on Christmas as well, in service of the almighty dollar. But if you listen to the words of Christmas for Cowboys carefully, you get the sense that the cowboy narrating this song enjoys his work: “Back in the cities, they have different ways. Football and eggnog and Christmas parades. I’ll take my blanket, I’ll take the reins…” In this verse, I get the sense that he thinks all the traditions of Christmas in the city are too much, that he enjoys the solitude of the wide open plains. You also get the beautiful impression he recognizes that  this solitude allows him to appreciate gifts from above, while the city folk are caught up in the commercialism of Christmas: “All of the good gifts given today, ours is the sky, and the wide open range.”

From what I understand reading historic accounts of the cowboy culture, they were not always the most moral segment of society. When they would come to a town, some would drink too much at the tavern and get into fights, or alleviate their loneliness with a prostitute for the night. As a result, they were often looked down upon by “respectable” folks.

Alone on the wide open plains, the cowboys also would not have been able to attend a formal church service on Christmas, and even if they made it to a town by Christmas, they likely would have felt uncomfortable walking into a church. But you get the sense that the cowboy in this song is far more in-tune with the spiritual than the city folks who go to formal church services. My favorite line of the whole song is: The wind sings a hymn as we bow down to pray.” What a beautiful analogy, as a gust of wind sounds far away, and then comes to a heavenly crescendo as it washes over you, much like the effect of a choir singing a hymn. And what a profound observation coming from a rough-living, unchurched cowboy, or at least a cowboy whose mama might have taken him to church as a child, but who hasn’t been in many years. I don’t know if there is a specific backstory that inspired the writing of this song. But regardless of whether this was the intention of the writer, or of John Denver’s decision to sing it, I love how this song implores us, in a nonjudgmental way, to use the occasion of Christmas to appreciate anew the simple gifts from above rather than getting swept up in our culture’s commercialization of Christmas, and to remember that Jesus often used, and still uses people we would least expect—the misfits of society—to speak truth to us.