It's the season of Yuletide once again, a time of darkness and dreary weather, but also a time of partying inside every home. The harvest is gathered in, and the folk are mostly lounging around eating and staying warm and doing indoor tasks until it's time to get ready to head to the fields again. This is a time of contrasts between the joy inside the hall and the scary darkness outside of it, especially in times and places where street lights and glass windows did not exist. Having walked around in the dark in the winter, it feels like a very foreign environment.
This is reflected in the musical choice to have 2 strongly contrasting sections, one describing the outside and the other the inside. The outside portion is a free-flowing D minor tune, aiming for the shivering feeling you'd get trying to go through without a jacket, not too much leaping about vocally. Once we get to inside, though, it's a jaunty straightforward F-major polka about how much fun it is to spend time in community, with some exercising of patter-singing skills and a lot of vocal jumping about. The hope is that these differences match the feelings in those two areas where we might have to spend our time in the winter.
All works are copyright by yours truly, but may be distributed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 4.0. That means, in short, you can use them yourself and your grove, and play the song to your heart's content both in private and in public, but must give credit where credit is due, and if you're planning on selling something involving this song we need to talk about that first.
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