Glory to God in the highest key known to man.

I was at a wonderful Christmas celebration today.  We sang carols. One of the difficulties with carols is that they were written when people could reach top F without any effort. Nowadays, most popular songs have a range of four lines of lyrics spread across six notes, none of them above top D, so when people are at a carol service and 'O Holy Night' is chosen they begin confidently because it starts well within their range. You can see them beginning to get a bit nervous at "Fall on your knees O hear the angel voices" and then they suddenly realise that they'll never make "O night divine"  and it's too late to drop an octave and be on the safe side. As if that wasn't bad enough, there's another "divine" coming which is possibly outside of the range of most angel voices never mind human ones. I'm not sure why, when we have capos, bar chords and transpose buttons we still insist on sticking with the key of E flat for 'O Holy Night'. The whole point of Christmas is that God came down to where we are because we couldn't reach Him where he is. God transposed himself so we could be in harmony with him. I wish you a very happy Christmas and a renewed understanding of what it really means.