Carols and Music

Music has always been an important part of celebrating Christmas, whether it's Silent Night or Slade.

In the previous centuries music came courtesy of the town waits: groups of singers who would go round the town entertaining people with the songs of the day and asking for money. One ancient tradition is wassailing, singing songs to wish people health in the new year. Usually wassailers were welcomed in to drink mulled wine or punch. In earlier times wassailing involved saluting the fruit trees in the middle of winter wishing them good luck and good fruit.

The word carol originally meant a circle dance, though carols have been associated with Christmas for 400 years. Most of the carols we sing these days were part of the revival of Christmas in the middle of the nineteenth century. They were collected into a book in 1871. When the book was published most of the writers were still alive it became the music that defined Christmas for the next hundred years. Many of the Victorian carols like "In the Bleak Midwinter" and "The First Nowell" have words that are very far removed from the Bible's account of how Jesus was born and owe more to popular sentiment than to the true Christmas story.

Click here for the stories of some well-known carols...