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Lead-up to Christmas Day
- Plenty of people do, and while we’re sure some sing Christmas carols all year round, it’s traditional to stick to singing carols in the lead-up to Christmas Day, if we’re to take Oxford’s definition of carols literally (see top of article).
www.classicfm.com/discover-music/occasions/christmas/carol-history-origins/
People also ask
Should you sing Christmas carols before or after Christmas?
Why do we sing Christmas carols?
Do you sing Christmas carols all year round?
Are Christmas carols a good song?
Are Christmas carols a pagan song?
Where did Christmas carols come from?
When can you start playing Christmas songs? Is November too soon? Should you wait until 1 December?
Nov 29, 2017 · So it's awfully close to the beginning of December. But if you think the fourth November is far too late, you might not be alone. According to The New York Post, millennials skew more in favor of...
Dec 23, 2011 · One of the reasons Christmas carols bring such a sense of consolation and connection is surely their familiarity. Most of us have sung them since our primary school days. We pride ourselves on...
- The Twelve Days of Christmas
- We Wish You A Merry Christmas
- Deck The Halls
- The Holly and The Ivy
- Silent Night
- Good King Wenceslas
- Once in Royal David’s City
- Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
- God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen
Alexandra Coghlan: Of all the Christmas carols we sing today, none presents more of a challenge than The Twelve Days of Christmas, with its baffling list of lyrics. What exactly are we to make of this aviary of birds – the swans, geese, doves, hens and calling birds – and what on earth is a partridge (strictly a ground bird) doing up a pear tree? T...
AC:What’s interesting about this catchy little carol are the customs it reveals. Both wassailing and mumming were still going strong under the Tudor monarchs, with carollers and players going from door to door performing. It was terribly bad luck not to reward their efforts with food and drink, including the ‘figgy pudding’ – an early version of wh...
AC: One popular 16th-century song was the carol we know today as Deck the Halls. Back then it was a favourite Welsh song, originally titled Nos Galan. It wasn’t until the 19th century that it acquired Christmassy words and became part of our own festivities. In its earliest form, Deck the Hallswas just a folk song, but one with some rather naughty ...
So try as Christian carol writers might to impose their own symbols on the plants – the red holly berry as Jesus’s blood, the white holly flower his shroud – they have to work hard to displace earlier layers of meaning. Some think there’s a further secret layer of meaning to the carol. Is the holly, with its phallic prickles, a symbol of the mascul...
AC: A firm favourite throughout the 19th century was the lovely Silent Night. Schoolmaster Franz Xaver Gruber and priest Joseph Mohr first performed the carol in the church of St Nikola in Oberndorf, Austria, in its original German (Stille Nacht) on Christmas Eve 1818. 1. Read more | Did the First World War Christmas truce football match really hap...
EB:The Reverend Doctor Neale was a high Anglican whose career was blighted by suspicion that he was a crypto-Catholic, so as warden of Sackville College – an almshouse in East Grinstead – he had plenty of time for study and composition. Most authorities deride his words as “horrible”, “doggerel” or “meaningless”, but it has withstood the test of ti...
EB: Cecil Frances Humphreys was born in Dublin to a comfortable Anglican family. In 1848 she published Hymns for Little Children, a book of verse explaining the creed in simple and cheerful terms and which gave us three famous hymns. So to the question who made the world, the answer was All Things Bright and Beautiful. Children’s questions on the m...
EB: Charles, the brother of Methodist founder John Wesley, penned as many as 9,000 hymns and poems, of which this is one of his best-known. It was said to be inspired by the sounds of the bells as he walked to church one Christmas morning and has been through several changes. It was originally entitled Hark How All the Welkin Rings – welkinbeing an...
EB: This is thought to have originated in London in the 16th or 17th centuries before running to several different versions with different tunes all over England. The most familiar melody dates back to at least the 1650s when it appeared in a book of dancing tunes. It was certainly one of the Victorians’ favourites. 1. Read more | Why do we kiss un...
- Ellie Cawthorne
Dec 23, 2021 · It’s certainly considered in poor taste to sing carols much before, or beyond, this period – no doubt amplified by ongoing superstitions such as it being bad luck to keep decorations up beyond the Twelfth Day of Christmas (which is 5 January, for anyone unsure).
Dec 13, 2021 · Christmas carols are defined simply as traditional songs that celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, sung ahead of Christmas Day. They are invariably tuneful, memorable, and magnificent. But how did they come about, and why do we sing them?
Dec 22, 2016 · Just as the songs used to bring people together many hundreds of years ago, singing carols at Christmas is still a popular activity to bring families and friends together over Christmas time.
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