Here we come a'caroling...

A few weeks ago, I reached out to my contacts across social media to help me narrow down some of people’s favourite Christmas carols (and not-carols). Having then curated a much more managably-sized list, I did a bit of nosing around for the history of each song, discovering some very dramatic and surprising facts about them along the way.

Many thanks to those of you who contributed to this little experiment! If you aren’t already a subscriber, consider signing up to read more from me. My hope is that I shall never be boring, but I promise that next week will be particularly fun!

Now, without any further ado, the songs, in ascending order of popularity:

#5 – Fairytale of New York

In the wake of Shane MacGowan’s recent passing, this very non-traditional Christmas song from the Pogues has been particularly prominent in the news. Fairytale of New York is gutsy and gritty: Christmas experienced not from a winter wonderland, but a gutter. It makes for a stark—for some, refreshing—change from the relentless holiday cheer of the season, and for many it strikes a chord of familiarity. Little wonder, then, that it has been an enduring classic in the UK for the last three-and-a-half decades.

Depending on which band member you listen to, Fairytale of New York was inspired either by a bet with Elvis Costello (MacGowan’s version) or a request from the band’s manager to cover a truly terrible Christmas song, which made the band think they could do better from scratch (as told by James Fearnley). In either case, it took two years of writing and rewriting from two members of the band, Jem Finer and MacGowan, to finish Fairytale of New York.

By this point, the Pogues had lost Cait O’Riordan, who was initially going to be MacGowan’s opposite in the duet. The band’s new manager stepped in to save the day by suggesting Kirsty MacColl, to whom he was married. MacColl was a very talented singer, and the band was deeply impressed with her work, particularly MacGowan, who re-recorded his vocals to match hers.

Fairytale of New York was released in 1987 on the album If I Should Fall from Grace with God. In the years since, it has remained a favourite of the cynical, the beaten down, and those who are just a little bit sick of the sound of jingling bells. It has been the subject of some controversy over some of its rougher lyrics, and the Pogues themselves have had their own conflicts (including MacGowan being booted from the band in 1991). Nevertheless, it has cemented itself as part of the aural landscape of December.

#4 – Snoopy’s Christmas

If, like me, you hail from Aotearoa New Zealand, you will undoubtedly recognise Snoopy’s Christmas as a staple of the holiday season. If you’re from just about anywhere else, though, you have likely never heard of it. Was the song recorded on a Kiwi label? No. Were any of the band from New Zealand? Nope, all Americans. Does the song have any connection with this country at all? Not aside from its seasonal popularity. So how did it get to be such a big hit in just one little cluster of islands on the other side of the Pacific?

Snoopy’s Christmas was released in 1967 by The Royal Guardsmen as part of their album Snoopy and His Friends; the song was a follow-up to a previous hit from the band called Snoopy vs. the Red Baron (yes, both songs feature the dog from Peanuts). It reached some immediate success internationally, but quickly dropped off the radar. In New Zealand, however, the song has hit the charts year after year after year.

Nobody really seems to understand quite why this is—even Australia, which often has similar sensibilities, isn’t interested in poor Snoopy. But here in Aotearoa, we’ll probably keep playing Snoopy’s Christmas every December until the end of time…

#3 – Carol of the Bells

The song we now know as “Carol of the Bells” was not intended to be a Christmas song. The music we’re so familiar with was composed by Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych at the start of the 20th century as an arrangement of a Ukrainian folk song celebrating the new year and arrival of spring.

Leontovych’s song, which he called “Shchedryk”, was picked up by Oleksander Koshyts in 1916 to be sung by his choir in Kyiv. It proved popular enough to become a core part of the Ukrainian National Chorus’s repetoire as it set off on the first international tour of a Ukrainian choir three years later.

The reasons for this tour were entirely political, stemming firstly from the Bolshevik overthrow of the Romanovs in 1917. In the tumultuous aftermath of the coup, Ukraine was declared an independent republic, but it was still a very fragile state. The new president, Symon Peliura, decided that the best way to generate international support for Ukraine was to send out a choir of the country’s finest to sing in representation of their homeland. And so they did, sharing their songs (including Shchedryk) and informational brochures about Ukraine with the world.

The choir was highly successful, but the Ukrainian People’s Republic was not. By 1921, the Bolsheviks had seized control of Ukraine and were systematically exterminating influential Ukrainians who posed a threat to their rule. One such threat was Leontovych, who had become associated with the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. In January of 1921, when he was celebrating Christmas with his parents, Leontovych was murdered by a Soviet agent. He was later declared a martyr by the Church.

Despite the loss of Ukraine’s nationhood, the Ukrainian National Chorus continued to tour. During 1922 they visited the United States, performing Shchedryk to great acclaim in cities across the country. They also made recordings of several songs, including Shchedryk. During this American tour, a young music student named Peter J Wilhousky heard the song for the first time. Wilhousky, whose family also came out of Eastern Europe, wanted to use it in a choral set list for some of his students, but knew that they would struggle with the Ukrainian lyrics, so he wrote some new ones in English. Shchedryk reminded Wilhousky of bells, which inspired his lyrics and the name “Carol of the Bells”.

Under this new identity, Leontovych’s melody celebrating his Ukrainian heritage has been heard thousands of times around the world each December, though we may not have known it for what it was.

#2 – O Holy Night

O Holy Night is a carol known nowadays for its grandeur and piety. It’s origins, however, suggested a very different sort of future. The details of the song’s history are as contentious and inconsistent as they are colourful, so take the following with a grain of salt, but I have tried to stick to fact as much as possible.

In the 1840s, a local parish church in Roquemaure underwent some renovations, and the priest wished to commemorate the occasion by commissioning a poem. He went to a local wine merchant and poet named Placide Cappeau, who accepted the job despite (probably) not having much of a religious bent and wrote a poem known as “Minuit, Chrétiens” (“Midnight, Christians”).

Cappeau handed his poem to composer Adolphe Adam to have music written for it, and the result was called “Cantique de Noël” (“Christmas Carol”). Cantique de Noël was instantly a hit throughout France, but soon began to give the Catholic Church some concerns. Cappeau was (quite possibly) an atheist and worse, a socialist, and some of the song’s lyrics certainly could be interpreted through a revolutionary lens—this became particularly worrying after the outbreak of the 1848 Revolution. Adam, too, was viewed with unease, as rumours about him being Jewish (most likely false) began to circulate. This wasn’t the sort of look the Church in France wanted to associate itself with, so it banned Cantique de Noël outright.

This did not, however, stop the song from remaining popular, and in soon spread internationally to Canada and the United States. One particular fan of the piece was American music critic and ordained Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight. He was inspired to translate Cantique de Noël into English in 1855, but his version takes a great many liberties with the text, infusing it with stronger religious overtones and ideas drawn from his own transcendentalist beliefs.

Dwight’s edition of “O Holy Night” soon overtook the French original in popularity (in the English-speaking world, at least), and is more or less the same classic Christmas banger we sing today, attempting in vain to hit those fantastic high notes.

#1 – Silent Night

When I started out researching Silent Night, the last thing I expected to find was skulls. As it happens, the history of this very peaceful carol is far from peaceful itself.

The first form that Silent Night took was as a German poem called “Stille Nacht”, which was written in 1816 by a Catholic priest named Josef Mohr living in Oberndorf, an Austrian town near Salzburg. Europe was just coming out of the turbulence of the Napoleonic wars, when silence and stillness were especially prized for their rarity.

The poem became a song two years later, when Mohr’s parish church of Saint Nicholas was flooded by the Salzbach river just before Christmas. The organ was left in bad shape, so to give the congregation some music to sing for the Christmas mass he called on Franz Xaver Gruber, who was the organist for the nearby church in Arnsdorf, for help. Within one afternoon, Gruber had written an arrangement for Stille Nacht that could be performed by the two men and a guitar, with the congregation coming in for the chorus. Since guitars were not approved for use in church, the song had to wait until after the mass to be sung, but sung it was.

Stille Nacht might have remained a local treasure if it weren’t for the arrival of the organ tuner, Karl Mauracher. He heard the song when he came to repair Saint Nicholas’ organ, and when he returned home to Tyrol he brought sheet music with him.

Tyrol is famous for its choirs, some of which would tour Germany over winter. A couple of these traveling choirs started including Stille Nacht in their repetoires, and it spread over Germany, then Europe. In 1839, the Rainer Singers brought it to the United States, where it was eventually translated into English in the 1850s. By this point, the origin of the popular carol had been lost. The Royal Hofkapelle, the Prussian court’s orchestra, had to send queries out to Salzburg to investigate.

By the 20th century, Stille Nacht had become a worldwide phemonenon. In 1912, sculptor Josef Mühlbacher took it upon himself to create a memorial to Mohr and Gruber, though this proved tricky; while Gruber had been painted in his lifetime, Mohr had left no image of himself when he died. Mühlbacher decided to remedy this by exhuming Mohr’s body and using the priest’s skull to create his likeness. The skull has never been reunited with the rest of Mohr’s body—a chapel dedicated to Silent Night (literally called the Silent Night chapel, pictured below) was built in Oberndorf in the 1920s, and the skull was interred within its walls, behind a peaceful nativity scene.

If you enjoyed reading about these songs as much as I enjoyed researching them, share this post with your friends! I’m sure they’ll like it too.