Published Nov 29, 2022
Released on the heals of Covid in November of 2021 on the Sparrow Records label, the Dove award-winning group, We The Kingdom, for their song, Holy Water, teamed up with Chris Tomlin to release this new song of worship and inspiration for the Christmas season. Innocently simple—the title is brilliant. What could easily be the tagline for a chain store outlet mall turns out to be a song about the best gift the world has ever received.
“Christmas Day” covers two important areas of worship music. Musically, this song is just fun to play. Its meter is fun to strum on a guitar, and its use of the non-standard chord progression keeps it within reach for most players. Vocally it spans only a minor 6th (less than an octave) which is a comfortable range for most congregations and sounds great with or without a full choir. Another clever musical element is that the verse is structured differently from the chorus, which is structured differently from the bridge, using three different cadences (plagal, half, and authentic). This is good writing because it keeps the listener engaged through its non-standard rotation through the chord sequence. The second important area of worship music is its theological precision. This is the message. In today’s fluff and fold digital economy, we need to examine every word so that we truly mean it when we sing the hook “light of the world, the reason for Christmas Day.”
While it lends itself well to a single acoustic guitar and a pair of voices, the possibilities are vast in orchestrating this for a broad production or worship service. Traditional worship, contemporary worship, or acoustic worship, Christmas Day is certainly the best day worth celebrating.
