Christmas Carols are songs or hymns with lyrics about Christmas. They are usually sung in weeks before Christmas, as a way that the season can be celebrated.
The real traditional Christmas carols usually have a strong tune together with parts that are specific to a soloist. They also tend to be followed by a chorus which is usually meant for the group sort of singing. The unique musical sound is because most traditional carols are based on a more medieval chord pattern.
During the Reformation, the Holiday carols lost a lot of their popularity; however they were kept alive in the rural communities. In the 19th century they made a comeback as many popular composers of the day started to publish their work sometime around the 1800’s.
Holiday carols lost much of their popularity in the cities during the Reformation, but were kept alive in more rural communities until they made a comeback in the 19th century when many popular composers of the day began to publish their works around the mid-1800’s.
Christmas Carols tend to have a religious overtone to them and this is partly because that they are usually sung during religious services as well as ceremonies. Most modern day Carol versions tend to celebrate the feelings and traditions of the Christmas season without religious lyrics. It may seem ironic to some being that Christmas is usually seen as the celebration of Christ’s birth by Christians in the month of December.
Sometime around the late 1800’s, happy celebrants would take to the streets and sing carols from one door to the other. People would give them food, clothing and money for the needy during the Christmas holidays. At certain other times carolers would be rewarded with drink at one house or the other and this made their caroling all the more merrier as the evening progressed. Nowadays you have carolers singing at nursing homes as well as retirement communities and hospitals and helping homebound people enjoy the festive season.
By the year 1880, carols were sung during Christmas services in a number of different churches. This was sometime after Charles Fry had created the idea of playing carols using a brass band at the Salvation Army.
The etymology of the word carol is in the Latin word “carula”, carula means circular dance and this may shed some light on why some of the earlier carols of the 1600’s were written and played for dancing. The practice of dancing to carols was soon forgotten as most organists chose to play them in church instead.
With the understanding of the history of the Christmas carol more light can still be shed on some favorite holiday songs still in existence today:
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.
At the end of the English Civil War in the early 1700’s, most churches went back to singing hymns instead of carols. It was at this time that Charles Wesley wrote a poem called Hark! How All The Welkins Ring. This was later added to a serious tune and it later metamorphosed into the carol we now know today.
Silent Night.
Silent Night is undoubtedly one of the most popular Christmas carols of all time. The carol had its origins in Catholic Austria were there were no regulations governing hymns. The first English translation was printed in 1871 in a Methodist hymnal.
