this holy tide of Christmas, all others doth deface

1st Grade today:

Teacher sings all the verses to "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen". (teacher is thinking in her head: this song is really old, why am I making 1st graders sing all these words they don't know?)

Teacher sings verse 1.

Students sing verse 1.

Teacher (Me): (writing on the board) Tidings = news.

Student who I thought wasn't listening: Oh I get it! I get it! I get the whole song! It's like 'Jesus is born! Jesus is born! Jesus is born'! (not sure why he waxed poetic right then)

Me: Yes, it's like, someone came and said, "Guess what I have good news! Jesus came!" And the angels were telling the shepherds the good news...

Student who I thought wasn't listening: It's like, I have good news, I have a new monster truck for you!

Student who is apparently right with me *says something about songs about Christmas

Me: Yes that news was so great that people were happy enough to write hundreds and thousands of songs about it! Was there ever any other news that made people THAT happy?!

Students who are usually right with me: no, no, there never was!

Student whose IQ is little too high for my taste: What if it was like... God sent a huge pinata down from heaven, and a really big angel hit the pinata and all these little angels came out and were singing...



So take that all you 'old song naysayers'. Today I prepared my kids for the Christmas program, SAT's, gave them some apologetics, brainstormed on a future pinata themed Christmas pageant, and the kids managed to be 100x more charming than if we had been playing some sort of age-appropriate singing game.