It always spoke to me that the angels didn’t just come to declare, but to sing. I read it now, as I write this, and it doesn’t actually say the word ‘sing,’ but we would all say so. How else do we imagine giving glory to God in majestic unison, if not in music? Many, many of us hear Handel’s glorious music in our minds as we read these words. “Glory to God in the highest!”

Christmas music was joyful music, and it was what I would sing as a child when I was happy, even if it wasn’t December. This sometimes made my next-oldest sister unhappy with me, oh, say, going through the grocery store behind our mother.

When my younger son wanted his bedtime song to be “Angels We Have Heard on High” out of season, I was happy to oblige. I love the music of Christmas.

As I grew older, the more solemn songs touched me also. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,/ and ransom captive Israel,/ that mourns in lonely exile here,/ until the Son of God appear.” The longing for meaning and hope spoke to me, in ways that childhood didn’t yet know. We are all in exile, here on the earth, without our God.

Music is one avenue for my heart to pour out its feelings. (Prayer is another, and there isn’t always any real separation between the two.)

“A multitude of the heavenly host.” The more I experience in this life, the deeper that sinks into my soul. Who was part of that “multitude”? Did it mean the presence of angels that could not be numbered, that in fact the end of them could not be seen, like looking into a set of facing mirrors in a reverent place?

Or were there a finite, visible number, but with the swelling presence of joy and declaration of thousands, millions, or more, that might be felt but not seen through the veil?

I harbor the hope that I was one. I hope that at least somewhere on the periphery, back beyond mortal sight, that I was part of the triumphant press of rejoicing, because this birth, after all, was the beginning point in mortality of all that we had chosen.

Maybe every single one of us was singing. It was the pure, perfect beginning of the promise of what would be. (So are we all born perfect in our own spheres.) He would be the One whose promise would be perfectly realized, and on whom we all depended. There was joy because of our trust that everything necessary would unfold and be accomplished for our redemption.

Those necessary things, choices and events, would be heart-rending. The shepherds marveled, and rejoiced, but Simeon also said to Mary, “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.”

Zecharias, his tongue loosed at last in his obedience, prophesied that the Son of God was coming “to give light to them who sit in darkness and the shadow of death; to guide our feet into the way of peace.” His miraculous son John would prepare the way. Together, the witnesses offered sober rejoicing.

I found one of my most cherished carols only in adulthood: “Once in Royal David’s City.” I sing my witness into the last verse:

He is the key to all that we hope for and everything in which we put our trust. The perfect wonder that is His birth is the deepest meaning of all that would come to pass.

I was sitting in a stake choir practice once, as the tenors were going over their notes and the other sections were listening and waiting. We were preparing a Christmas program.

I thought of the baby in the manger, imagined seeing him as the shepherds did, and suddenly I saw that tiny hand, and arm, lengthen out — growing — and stretched out against the wood of the cross, as it was nailed there for us, for his love of us.

The faith, the awe, of the shepherds doing their ordinary guardian work, out with their flock overnight.

King David had been a shepherd boy when he was called. Christ, the prophesied heir to the throne of David, would talk of himself as the Good Shepherd, and use the images of that familiar and simple life many times in teaching the message he brought. He had come to gather us into his eternal fold.

These shepherds had no wealth or position to advance this king, but they were chosen to celebrate his birth with opened hearts and eyes, representing us all. Do we believe?

I wonder if some of them heard of this teacher, many long years later, who did miracles. He didn’t remain where they lived, he didn’t grow up in their sight, after all. Did they hear, and their hearts prick with memory, and did they come to see, and follow him?

He calls us to follow still.