Bells for the Holidays
I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play
And mild and sweet their songs repeat
Of peace on Earth, good will to men
Bells have always been a special part of the holiday season. On Christmas, they ring joyously to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Whether in dense cities where the ringing fills the air or in small villages where there may be just one bell ringing, their joy is contagious and symbolizes the hopes and prayers of Christianity. Bells are also a favorite choice for holiday songs, such as “Jingle Bells” and “Silver Bells,” while reindeer wear bells that jingle as they fly through the night delivering Santa’s toys and sleigh bells can often be heard ringing across snow-clad fields.
Another familiar place we hear bells in the holidays is when they are rung by Salvation Army volunteers who stand in front of stores with their red buckets soliciting donations to help those in need. Although the Salvation Army was founded in 1865, it didn’t start using bells until 1900 when a teenage volunteer named Amelia Kunkel was standing in front of a building on Wall Street in downtown New York soliciting gifts, and most of the bankers just passed her by without even a glance. In frustration, she went to a nearby Woolworths and bought a small bell for 10 cents and started ringing it to draw attention to her appeal – and it worked. The bell became a familiar part of the Salvation Army and is now heard on streets from early November through Christmas Eve.
Bells play a special role on New Year’s, striking out the hours of midnight to announce the beginning of the new year. Starting at the bell towers closest to the International Date Line, bells ring all around the world as each time zone reaches midnight, a truly global ringing.
There is also an exciting new bell festival that was founded in 2020 to organize and encourage bell ringing on New Year’s Day called the National Bell Festival. Ringers in cathedrals, churches, national parks, memorials and other places are asked to ring together for twenty minutes all across the country from Hawaii to the East coast at 2:00 Eastern time. Paul Ashe, the Director of the Festival describes the hopes of the Festival:
The National Bell Festival takes as inspiration a time when a bell would be the very heartbeat of a community. Back in the day, when a bell tower was ringing, the village would gather, discuss the news, and plan a path forward together. Whether a war or wedding, festival or fire, the simple act of bell ringing would signal community togetherness, collaboration, and collective potential – values the National Bell Festival hopes to inspire as it gets more bell ringing in more places.
Finally, although we are all familiar with Charles Dicken’s tale A Christmas Carol, few people are aware that he wrote a companion piece about New Year’s eve called The Chimes. The Chimes tells the story of an elderly porter Toby Veck who waits outside the door of his church for people to hire him to take messages. Very poor, he forms a relationship with the old bells in the steeple whose ringing brings him solace. On New Year’s Eve, his beloved daughter Meg comes to him with the news that she will marry her own beloved Richard on New Year‘s Day. Although they will be poor, they will be happy if they can be together.
But Richard is influenced by the materialistic town leaders who despise the poor and tell him he can “do better” by marrying someone more promising. Distraught by Meg’s sorrow after Richard breaks the engagement, Toby climbs up the steep stairs and ladders to the belfry to find comfort in the bells. Here he falls under the spell of the bells whose spirits take him on a journey into the future where he sees Meg living a destitute life of endless work barely managing to stay alive, while Richard becomes a drunkard, wasting his own life. Coming out of the spell, Toby rushes to Richard and Meg and insists they marry as planned. The bells then ring out “so lustily, so merrily, so happily, so gaily” to announce the New Year and the happy marriage.
The New Year is also evoked in one of our most powerful “bell” poems, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” which begins:
Ring out wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night,
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go:
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Share your own memories, thoughts, and stories about bells with Jaan at: jaan@thebellsbook.com