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Are Christmas carols UN-Christmassy?
Dec 20, 2016 · Alamy. The familiar tunes never fail to get us in the festive mood – but many of them have remarkably un-Christmassy roots, writes Mark Forsyth. The Christmas carol service was invented in...
- What Was The First Christmas Carol?
- When Did People Start ‘Carolling’?
- What Makes Christmas Music So Christmassy?
- Why Aren’T Christmas Carols Sung All Year round?
It’s generally accepted that one of the first Christmas carols ever to be recorded was the 129 AD ‘Angels Hymn’, according to The New Daily. Around this time, Christianity-themed hymns started taking over the previous pagan songs celebrating Winter Solstice. More and more slow, solemn hymns started to emerge in the fourth century, and by the 12th, ...
The notion of groups of carollers assembling in public spaces was a 19th-century one, according to Oxford. Called ‘waits’, these collections of singers used to gather to perform for passers-by, who traditionally thanked them with tasty offerings of drinks or mince pies. It became known as wassailing and continues today, of course. Groups continue t...
There are several elements that go into something seeming to sound unquestionably Christmassy. Stirring melodies are usually sprinkled with minor and diminished chords – think of the mix of major and minor melody lines in ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ – in popular Christmas carols and songs. This all underpins lyrics that are nostalgic, and often a...
“Oh, well I wish it could be Christmas everyday, When the kids start singing and the band begins to play...” rock band Wizzard first sung in the 1970s. Plenty of people do, and while we’re sure some sing Christmas carolsall 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 ...
- Ellie Cawthorne
- The Twelve Days of Christmas. 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.
- We Wish You a Merry Christmas. 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.
- Deck the Halls. 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.
- The Holly and the Ivy. 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.
Where do carols come from, how did they become so popular – and why are some carols not actually carols at all? We reveal the secret history of these festive favourites.
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...
Dec 13, 2021 · We sing Christmas carols because they are a way of telling the story of the nativity and the birth of Jesus Christ. As well as explaining what happened around Jesus’s birth, the songs enable us to encapsulate and express the joy, devotion and awe-inspiring scenes of the nativity.
Meet people from the centuries gone by, learn about the unique artworks in our care and understand more about historic traditions. Find out about the history of Christmas carols and why familiar songs we sing today owe more to 19th and early 20th-century tastes than medieval era.
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