Silent Night

Wallpaper Description:

Silent nights are an uncommon occurrence in The Big Apple, but on a frosty evening in late November, a group of people are gathered at a Colonial-Era churchyard cemetery on the grounds of New York City’s Trinity Church. There’s a nip in the air, but it has zero effect on the feeling of warmth and fellowship amongst the crowd standing under the bright lights of the giant towers of the city’s Financial District.

On this night, Lower Manhattan’s nocturnal cacophony of howling sirens, honking car horns and the bustling bleat of holiday shoppers will be stilled for a moment or two. The occasion: an outdoor concert celebrating the bicentennial of one of the world’s most beloved Christmas carols, “Silent Night.”

For most people “Silent Night” is associated with crooner Bing Crosby. Crosby originally recorded the song to help raise money for the St. Colomban Foreign Missionary Society in 1935. The song was an instant hit, but when Crosby performed it again in his hit film Going My Way in 1944, the song became an instant classic engrained in the holiday season psyche of Americans, and most of the English-speaking world.

The roots of “Silent Night,” however, are not American, they’re Austrian. The song we know and love today, was initially inked as a six stanza poem by a young assistant priest from Salzburg named Joseph Mohr in 1816.