The Flight To Egypt chords by Penny Wilcock

SimplifiedDm · Am · G · C
GuitarPianoUkulele
Verse 1
Dm 
When you were grown up
and telling stories to your children,
I wonder what things you will remember
from when you were a child.
One of the things I remember
is being taken to visit my great -granny,
a small, round, smiley old lady
with white hair in a bun
and old -fashioned dresses.
She wore glasses with gold rims
and her eyes were twinkly and kind,
so it was a nice sort of sparkly
feeling
when she looked at me.
And our mother used to take me
and my sister
to visit great -granny from time to time.
There were some things I remember
especially about these visits.
I remember that she loved her garden,
and that great -granny and our
mother
would spend a long time
looking at the flowers
and growing things.
She had plants inside her house too.
I liked the big fern
that stood in the corner.
A fern is a lovely plant,
it doesn't have colourful flowers,
but it has light green leaves
that are graceful and cool
and refreshing.
Great Granny also had a clock,
called a granddaughter clock,
like a grandfather clock but
smaller.
Me and my sister discovered
that if we jumped hard on the floorboards
near the granddaughter clock
we could make it chime,
even when it wasn't
the right time for chiming.
After the jumping and the chiming
had gone on for a while,
our mother would say,
you must come and sit down quietly
now.
And we did.
But the problem was,
Great Granny had a rocking chair.
Now we didn't have a rocking chair
at home,
and me and my sister
thought it was wonderful
to sit in this chair
and make it rock.
But of course we couldn't both sit in it at once,
and we used to argue about who would go on the rocking chair,
so our mother said, stop arguing,
you must take it in turns.
Then one of us would go on the rocking -chair,
but the other had to have something to play with or to look at,
so as to be able to sit quietly and wait
for a turn on the chair.
There isn't much in the way of toys
in Great Granny's house,
of course,
but there were some ornaments
we were allowed to
hold and look at.
Two of them I remember especially.
One was a brush that was made
in the shape of a beautiful lady.
It looked like a doll,
a doll of Cinderella in her dress
to go to the ball.
She had long, ringlet -y hair,
and And she held the top part of
her skirts of her dress,
as if she was going to dance.
And the shimmering blue
and pink skirts of her dress
were the bristles of the brush.
I thought this Cinderella brush
was so pretty,
and such a clever idea,
so I liked to be allowed to hold it
and play with it.
Then the other thing I liked especially
was an ornament they call
a snowstorm.
Have you seen one of those?
It's a glass dome,
and inside it are figures of people,
or trees, or animals,
with snow on the
ground around them.
And it's all filled with water,
so that when you shake it up,
then hold it still to look at,
the white snowflakes whirl around,
exactly like a snowstorm.
Now my great -granny
had one of these interesting things,
and along the base of it
were some words written,
my mother read the words to me,
the flight to Egypt. it.
So the little scene inside the glass dome
of the snowstorm was called
The Flight to Egypt.
Before I shook it up to make it snow
on the people inside it,
I used to look carefully at them,
because you couldn't
see them so well
while it was snowing.
It was the same people
as I had on my car to look at for
rest time—Joseph
walking along leading the donkey,
and Mary riding on the donkey's back,
only this time Mary's tummy had gone
back down to normal
and she was cradling a little baby in her arms,
the baby Jesus.
And I liked it because you could turn it
round
and see the front of them,
and the back of them,
and the side of them,
not like the card
when you can only see the front.
In Great Granny Snowstorm
Mary had on the same blue dress,
and the baby Jesus was wrapped up
warm and cosy in a white shawl.
Joseph had his stick and his bag
and his handles just the same,
but he was wearing a red robe this time.
The people in the snowstorm were small,
so it wasn't easy to make out their faces,
but you could see at once
it was the same people,
only this time they were going
somewhere different.
They'd been to the stable
at Bethlehem with the star,
and Jesus had been born there,
and the angels had fetched the shepherds to see him,
and now Mary and Joseph
were on their way somewhere
else.
One thing was puzzling me.
The snowstorm had the words,
the flight to Egypt,
but nothing was flying.
There were no birds,
and in the days of Mary and Joseph,
aeroplanes hadn't been thought
up yet.
So why did it say the flight
when nothing was flying?
I asked our mother about it,
and she explained to me
that sometimes flight means flying like a bird,
but sometimes it means
running away.
Joseph and Mary were running
away.
They were running away to Egypt,
a long way from Bethlehem where Jesus was born,
and a long way from their
home in Nazareth.
Our mother said they had to run away,
because of King Herod.
King Herod wanted to kill Jesus.
I thought that was terrible,
because Jesus was only a little baby then,
and even when he grew up
he was good and kind.
He told people stories about God our
Heavenly Father,
and he made them better when they were
ill.
I thought everybody loved Jesus.
I thought you had to love Jesus.
But King Herod certainly didn't,
and our mother said this was because King Herod
was jealous of Jesus.
So then I wanted to know,
why should anyone be jealous of a
little baby like that?
Why should a king,
who lived in a palace
and dressed in velvet and jewels and fur,
be jealous of a little baby of a man and a woman so
poor they had to shelter in a stable
for that little baby to be born?
And then our mother told me
that from the beginning of time,
it was written in the stars
about baby Jesus.
Jesus, that little baby asleep on the hay,
was the one who came from heaven
to bring God's kingdom of peace
and love to earth.
The angels said so.
The wise men saw it written in the stars
and they knew.
But of course, if Jesus had a kingdom of love and peace,
then that made him a king, didn't it? That little baby,
asleep in the manger,
was born to be a king of
great power.
So when King Herod heard
about Jesus being born,
he was jealous and afraid.
He was afraid that Jesus would come and
take his crown away,
and his palace, and all his money,
for Jesus to be king
instead of Herod.
And so he wanted to kill him,
so that could never happen.
But Herod didn't understand,
did he? Maybe no one told him that money doesn't matter
in the kingdom of Jesus,
because the power of Jesus
is not the power
you can buy with money.
Oh no, it's the power of love.
And that was why Joseph and Mary
had to run away with their donkey
and their little baby all
the way to the far land of Egypt,
so that baby Jesus would be safe from King Herod,
until it was all right to come home to Nazareth,
to their house and Joseph's carpenter
shop.
When I had looked carefully at the
little figures
walking along together,
Am 
I would hold the snowstorm
Dm 
in both my hands
and shake it up to make it snow.
I don't suppose it really snowed
on the flight to Egypt
because I think Egypt is hot
and sunny.
But whenever I think of Mary and Joseph,
running away from Herod,
escaping with the baby Jesus
Dm 
from the soldiers an  d their swords,
hurrying away to a hiding place
until it was safe to come home.
Dm 
I think of them walking through a storm of snow,
with shawls over their heads
and their shoulders hunched in the cold and wind,
Dm 
Mary bending over Jesus
to keep him warm and dry,
Dm 
and Snowflake settling on the
donkey's eyelashes
and his long, furry ears.
I'm glad they kept baby Jesus safe,
aren't you? Whatever would we have done without Jesus?
Am 
G 
Am 
G 
C 
Am 
Dm 
You
Am 