December 12, 2002

Plains Folk: Cradle Hymn

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Little kids work cheap, especially at Christmas. They do the essential work of making Christmas happen--the recitations, the songs, the enactments, the general practice of ritual without cynicism--for just a bag of candy, paid on delivery at the back of the church. 

Some of you may remember the ritual the same as I do. There was an orange in the bag along with some peanuts but you had to rummage around in there to find the candy.  Wages disbursed by guys whose choice of after-shave was guided by the between-round ads of the Friday Night Fights.

One of the things kids do to earn their keep is sing songs like "Luther’s Cradle Hymn" (incorrect attribution, as he didn’t write it) a.k.a. "Away in the Manger."  Standard division of labor assigns this task to the youngest workers. I’ve always been a little troubled by the words of the song. I’m thinking of the stanza that concludes,

Bless all the dear children in thy tender care,
And take us to heaven, to live with Thee there.

What I mean is, I’m not ready to ship my grandkids off to heaven or anywhere else. I intend to precede them in any such journey.

I grew up in the German Lutheran tradition. Nowadays I hang out with the Swedes (attending the oldest Swedish Lutheran church in North Dakota), and it turns out they’re pretty good folks.  The Nordic type of Lutherans have this other song they like to have kids sing, "Children of the Heavenly Father," which is a beautiful little song, but I have the same qualms about it, too. It has that stanza that goes,

Though He giveth or He taketh,
God His children ne’er forsaketh;
His the loving purpose solely
To preserve them pure and holy.

Once again, I have a hard time seeing the loving purpose in anything or anybody who taketh the kids. What’s the deal with this morbidity in the songs we associate with children? The answer, of course, is that these are old traditional songs, composed and perpetuated in places and times when infant mortality was a continual source of grief. 

Any family in any community suffered the loss of small children and at any time someone had suffered it recently.  The songs from the old country, places of historic plague, continued to serve well in the new world, where diptheria dug little graves into prairie swells, and where in living memory, polio extended such grief for another generation.

I love tradition, and I recognize mortality more every day, but in teaching the Cradle Hymn to my grandkids, I’ve taken liberty with the stanzas. This first one is fine for a starry night on the plains.  After that my prairie version departs from the standard. For kids, the song needs more animals. Appropriate sound effects are encouraged.

The coyotes were howling, the dogs barking, too,
The pig he was grunting, and the cow, she went moo.
The rooster was crowing at sunrise to say,
Bless all the poor animals on this Christmas day.

And in conclusion, I think the song needs to situate itself squarely on the prairies for prairie kids.

Out here on the prairie the snow lies so deep
We think of baby Jesus in the manger asleep
But warm is the stable, and soft is the hay,
So sleep, baby Jesus, until Christmas day.

Now, I’m fully aware that my own traditions are not those of everyone. Especially among newcomers to the land, we have different holidays and different observances, all worthy of veneration.  And of continued adaptation to the place we now call home.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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