I've noticed the radio Christmas music seems more secular this year than last.

Can't say I've noticed this to be true. I hear them everywhere still and the people belt them out.

The only thing that really bothered me with the carols before and at Mass this Christmas was the crappy changes to the traditional texts printed for all to see, thanks to OCP. It didn't help that the Ordinary was by Schutte, too.

Originally, one of the "St. Louis Jesuits" group of composers.

Amen Charles.

At my parish people sang better than average at all except the 4:30PM Christmas Eve Mass, which incidentally was also the most packed. Almost no one singing.

At the other Masses, everyone sang O Come, Hark, Joy to the World at the top of their lungs...and a large percentage sang silent night but quietly (appropriately).

My cantor, who turned pages, had to fend off more people than usual who wanted to converse with me while I was performing brain surgery playing a Bach prelude and fugue after Mass.

It's not hard to see why.

Almost anywhere, the early vigil is full of people who want to "get it over with," and feel some sense of guilt to go to mass at least on Christmas and Easter, lest they go to hell.

The Midnight mass is full of people who love liturgy, and they get excitement in their voice and a twinkle in their eye when they talk about the choir, the trumpets, and the sweet smell of incense at the mass.

Christmas Day is full of many "regular parishioners," who go to mass every week and didn't want to stay up for Midnight or prefer a less crowded mass with less fuss.

The level of singing at each is commensurate with the attitude of each group that drives them to that particular mass.

And may God bless Dan Schutte.

Maybe God sent him a little pony for Christmas. ;-)

bad when you cannot remember beyond the phrase, Saint Michael the Archangel defend us.

Something about fit to be tied ;-)

Cdub, at least you have your priorities as well as your tongue firmly in cheek and check.
There is precious little time to waste upon flinging vitriol and sarcasm at the apostates and great unwashed any ol' durn day, but 'specially Christ-mas?
People, what are your priorities? Saving people from the enemy or abandoning them to the enemy by closing the gates of your hearts and minds? Da-nya-beet.

Slightly off-topic, has anyone else noticed another HUGE shift in attendance away from Midnight Mass towards vigils, especially when said vigils are "family" services?

At my present church, we had 4, 7, 9, 11, and then 11 on Christmas Day. Each with noticeably less attendance over the preceding service, with Christmas Day probably having 30.

especially when said vigils are "family" services?

Churches dig their own graves and then get surprised when they find themselves in them.

I think our attendance at the 4pm, 6pm, and 11pm Masses were all about equal with 4 and 11 pretty just slighty ahead of 6pm. The Sung Mass at Dawn was sparse, but the Sung Mass during the Day was better attended than last year.

MId-night mass at Walsingham was very well attended. The people sang heartily on all the carols and hymns. With the addition of another morning mass a few months ago we now have a Saturday vigil and three Sunday morning masses, and there is talk of adding a six o'clock Sunday evening mass. We are literally bursting at the seams. Participation at all our masses is exemplary. (For me, personally, Christmas without mid-night mass is no Christmas at all. It's unthinkable.)

The singing at St Basil's Chapel at UST was also very good on Christmas morning. The congregation there always sing heartily and love to do so. They even stay and sing very well all the stanzas of the dismissal hymn.

I do worry, and worry very much, though, about a problem to which Gavin alludes. We are living in a land whose culture has been subject to systematic dismantling for my entire life. Large numbers of people have not had our musical, liturgical, literary, and artistic culture communicated to them, and, further, it has been consciously rejected by large numbers of people who have had it communicated to them. This is sad. It is depressing. And, I fear that it is an historical process which is going to continue. This goes far beyond the historically typical generational variants of a basically preserved culture. This is a conscious and deliberate jettisoning of old values, beliefs, mores, and aesthetic markers by our intellectual elites in and out of academia. Yes, I am astonished to encounter not infrequently people who never heard of Beethoven, et al., have never seen a work of art, nor read any of our literary canon. And, I am not talking about truck drivers. I am talking about PhDs from major universities.

The collusion of very large numbers of our clergy (and that includes prelates!), Catholic school teachers, and Catholic university professors (not to mention monks and nuns in quite a number of orders) in this process is a fiendish calumny. (Oh! and don't forget our big publishers, mendacious and unprincipled, every one of them.) The handiwork of all the aforementioned is seen in the pop-music masses and Ed Sullivan style liturgy that are commonplace in our churches, and in congregations who know nothing but liturgical junk music and have been taught to hate our musical and linguistic patrimony. And, the seed for all this was planted over two hundred years ago in Josephine Austria and revolutionary France. We too easily forget that history is a continuum and that very little that happens does so without roots in an historical process.

I think that it has more to do with the consumerisation of music. People don't learn to play instruments or to sing any more. They download music onto their iPods and have lots of music on-demand. Why would you go to effort of singing when you can just listen?

People don't even "sing" the pop songs any more, they just shout out some of the catchier lyrics when they come around.

I make a point of having at least all the best-known Christmas Carols: "O Come, All Ye Faithful"; "Joy to the World" and "Silent Night." One of my usual Christmas Carols is "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night" and "What Child is This?"

Why pay for the rights to use his music when there is plenty of very good public-doman/royalty-free music out there? Save the $$$ for the organ fund.

MJO, I think you nailed it.

There were 200 people at the vigil Mass. My dad and I were the only people singing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” They also skipped singing “O Come All Ye Faithful.” Grr.

My aunt tried to pass it off as Massachusetts reservedness (we are in MA with family). No, people don’t sing, eapecially in a Christian liturgical context, and Christmas is secularized for them (I nearly choked reading the letter to the Boston Globe about Christmas being for everybody... Fine, if all accept the Christ Child!) My younger sister and I were the loudest at the sung Form C Penitential Act (deacon sang invocations with responses from Litany of the Saints melody).

They did, however, sing a refrain Gloria that would have been OK if through-composed (it sounded somewhat like a contemporary Anglican composition style). Alas, the refrain was the “Gloria in excelsis Deo” of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” I was in tears.

In contrast, the congregation at the Midnight Missa Cantata sang the carols well, if quietly, when Jesus was carried to the crib. Now, they didn’t sing at Mass... But that is another step towards FCAP in the best and fullest sense. All paid attention and were in no hurry.

Where I was, Midnight Mass seemed slightly down from the previous year.
For my EF gig, on Christmas Day, attendance seemed lower that a typical Sunday. Hard to draw conclusions about carols, since hymns aren't a big thing with us. We did a verse of Adeste fideles to get the priest in, and all of Joy to the World at the end. I can't say I heard a lot of singing, but I usually don't.

The big atrocity: I usually arrive before the end of the 11AM P & W Mass. Final hymn was The Little Drummer Boy. I don't remember that tale from the Protoevangelion of James or the Gospels of Infancy. So it doesn't even rise to the apocryphal.

Isn't Davis the author of the text of Let All Things Now Living too?

Well, we in the bourbon lands sing the carols very nicely. All of the liturgies sang them with gusto. I certainly practice them with the school for the weeks before the feasts.

Even the 4 o'clock vigil, the largest mass of the day, sang them well. But some of the carols trailed off as you got deeper into the texts.

Oh,well, we know our carols and drink our bourbon well in the Kentucky holylands.

We had around 300 or so at Midnight Mass. The congregation rattled the rafters on "O Come All Ye Faithful," even singing the first verse in Latin, then the four English verses to the famous Willcocks descants. They also sang well on "Silent Night" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing." The recessional, "Joy to the World" was sung so heartily, that the singers almost overpowered full organ. Carols are alive and well with us, but we were always proudly a little old-fashioned.

I recall meeting a violinist from Soviet Russia, who loved sacred music
from before the commies came. Singing of c carols were forbidden in public.
When he escaped to usa, it was during christmas
and he heard people singing christmas carols right away.
This moved him to tears. A bit later he was able to perform in Handels'
Messiah, which he had not been able to play for 20 years.
Sometimes when at church during Christmas, I
start to think "O LORD, these same carols i'm
so tired of"...I remember this Russian story.

@MatthewRoth: Let us know when you're coming to MA for holidays and we'll recommend the good parishes!

Last year, I heard a priest sing "When a child is born" (a Johnny Mathis song) in his Christmas Eve homily.

Our PIPs sing like birds, especially on Christmas. The problem as many have noted is that the kids don't know the carols. I teach at a Catholic school, so I try to hit some of the more common ones so that the kids will know them. I think that the problem is that we assume they already know the carols, when we should be ensuring that they do.