Favourite Christmas Carols

Special Report

Favourite Christmas Carols

Christmas carols in English first appeared in a 1426 work by John Awdlay, a Shropshire chaplain, who lists 25 “caroles of Cristemas”. These were probably sung by groups of ‘wassailers’, groups who travelled from house to house, singing carols, for which they were often rewarded with an appropriate drink.

SILENT NIGHT

One of the most beloved Christmas carols, Silent Night originated in the tiny village of Oberndorf in the Austrian mountains. The story goes that the day before Christmas Eve in 1818, Father Joseph Mohr, pastor of Saint Nicholas church, discovered that the church organ was broken, meaning there would be no music for his midnight mass. Taking a verse he had written two years previously he travelled several miles through the snow to his friend Franz Gruber, a schoolteacher and musician, and Gruber set it to music. At midnight mass, Father Mohr and Gruber, accompanied only by Gruber’s The Silent Night Chapel in Oberndorf, guitar, sang the gentle song “Silent Credit Gakuro, CC BY-SA 3.0 Night, Holy Night” for the first time. The carol has been translated into nearly 300 languages and dialects and its message of heavenly peace sets the theme for Christmas celebrations around the globe. The song was sung simultaneously in English and German by troops during the WW1 Christmas truce of 1914, as it was one of the few carols that soldiers on both sides of the frontline knew.

GOOD KING WENCESLAS

This famous carol tells the story of a Bohemian king going on a journey and braving harsh winter weather to give alms to a poor peasant on the Feast of Stephen (26 December, the Second Day of Christmas). During the journey, his page is about to give up the struggle against the cold weather but is enabled to continue by following the king’s footprints, step for step, through the deep snow. In 1853, English hymnwriter John Mason Neale wrote the ‘Wenceslas’ lyric in collaboration with his music editor, Thomas Helmore, and the carol first appeared in Carols for Christmas-Tide, published in the same year.

O HOLY NIGHT

Listeners to Classic FM have consistently voted O Holy Night to be their favourite Christmas carol. Originally based on a French-language poem by poet Placide Cappeau, written in 1843, with the first line “Minuit, chrétiens! c’est l’heure solennelle” (Midnight, Christians, is the solemn hour), was set to music by composer Adolphe Adam in 1847. The English version is by John Sullivan Dwight. The carol reflects on the birth of Jesus as humanity’s redemption.

IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER

Based on a poem by the English poet Christina Rossetti, this carol was written sometime before 1872 in response to a magazine request for a Christmas poem. The poem became recognised as a carol after it appeared in The English Hymnal in 1906, with music by Gustav Holst. To advertise in The Villager and Town Life please call 01767 261122 23