Deck The Hall: Stories of our favourite Christmas Songs

by Andrew Gant

Andrew Gant is the author of the recently published book, Deck the Hall: the stories of our favourite Christmas Carols. Here he introduces us to some of the stories behind them.

Deck the hall

Our much-loved English Christmas carols have a rich and fascinating history. But it might not be quite as you might expect. For a start, very many of them are not entirely, or even remotely, English. The words of O Little Town of Bethlehem, Away in a Manger, We Three Kings and It Came Upon the Midnight Clear were all written in America. Good King Wenceslas has one foot in Finland. Ding, Dong! Merrily on High owes its familiar tune to a sixteenth-century French dancing manual.

And quite a few started life having little to do with Christmas: some of our favourite carol melodies were originally sung to words about something quite different, including folksongs about ploughboys, secular songs about the coming of spring, love songs, New Year songs, and pretty much everything else. Even the blameless word ‘carol’ used to have little or no seasonal association: ‘This carol they began that hour… How that life was but a flower’ sing Shakespeare’s ‘lover and his lass’.[1] Their minds were certainly not on tinsel and wrapping paper, never mind the birth of Jesus Christ.

Joy to the World

This is also true of Joy To The World, claimed to be the most-published Christmas carol in North America. The words are a paraphrase of Psalm 98 by Isaac Watts, which was set to a tune composed (or, more properly, arranged) by the early nineteenth-century American musician Lowell Mason. Mason was a banker by profession, but devoted his time and energy to music, particularly in churches and schools, in and around Boston. In 1836, he published his Occasional Psalm and Hymn Tunes. Joy to the World is no. 73. Mason calls the tune Antioch, for no obvious reason. He also tells us that the music is ‘Arranged from Handel’. It isn’t. But the attribution stuck, and appeared in countless hymn books and carol service sheets thereafter. Something similar happened with O Come, All Ye Faithful, which was also often ascribed to Handel during the nineteenth century, with a similar total lack of any kind of justification. Handel might have wished he could have been around to pick up the royalties from two extremely popular songs, neither of which he actually wrote.

In the Bleak Midwinter

In the Bleak Midwinter – frequently voted one of the nation’s favourite Christmas carols – was originally written as a poem by Christina Rossetti and published in 1872 in New York. Although the poem was called ‘A Christmas Carol’, Rossetti used the word in this context to mean words only. It wasn’t until after her death that music was added to these beautiful words – in this case, by two different composers. Gustav Holst composed his setting of In the Bleak Midwinter for the first edition of the English Hymnal, published in 1906, naming the tune ‘Cranham’ after the Cotswold village where he and his wife had recently been living. Five years later, Harold Darke composed his setting of Rossetti’s poem in 1911 as a Christmas gift for a friend. Darke omitted Rossetti’s original fourth verse in order to create his regular musical scheme of two pairs of verses – solo then choir. He also changed, ‘a breastful of milk’ to ‘a heart full of mirth’, which was a bit over-prudish even for a child of the Victorian age, and certainly not in keeping with centuries-old traditions of poetic and visual images of the Virgin and Child. The original wording was soon reinstated by editors.

And there is much more to discover in carols across the ages. There are poems for children and tunes by (or arranged by) Arthur Sullivan, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and, above all, by that great and multi-faceted genius, Anon. There is a song about falling out of a sleigh into a snowdrift, and a song claiming that the shepherds were guided to Bethlehem by the light of the star (they weren’t: that was the three kings).

Above all, the history of carols is a celebration of great tunes, memorable words, and a fascinating and unmissable part of our beloved Christmas traditions. Happy Christmas!

Andrew Gant
Andrew Gant’s book, Deck the Hall: the stories of our favourite Christmas Carols is published by Hodder & Stoughton

[1] As you like it: Act v, scene 3