Christmas Carols Explained
I've meant to do this for years.
Last week I announced a new series I’m doing for December, where I go through a select list of carols or Christmas songs that I love and briefly explain their origins, along with my favorite arrangement thereof. Starting tomorrow I will do one such video per day and they’ll be linked here.
Note: these songs won’t necessarily be “popular” music, in that they’ll originate from longstanding religious tradition and focus on the core meaning of the holiday. We’re not concerning ourselves with misfit reindeer, footwear, hippopotami, or various family members being trampled by season winter fauna. You will not be Whammed in the course of this exercise. Thou art welcome.
The following list will help me keep track of what I’m doing and when. Here are the songs in a semi-curated order.
1: O Holy Night
2: Good King Wenceslas
3: Hark, the Herald Angels Sing
4: Little Drummer Boy
5: Veni Veni/O Come Emmanuel
6: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
7: Deck the Halls
8: In Dulci Jubilo
9: I Saw Three Ships
10: Far, Far Away on Judea’s Plain
11: Stille Nacht/Silent Night
12: Angels We Have Heard On High
13: Believe
14: Wexford Carol
15: Carol to the King
16: Los Peces en el Rio/Fish in the River
17: Away in a Manger
18: What Child is This?/Greensleeves
19: O, Tannenbaum/Oh Christmas Tree
20: Noel
21: It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
22: Carol of the Bells
23: Joy to the World!
24: For Unto Us a Child is Born
25: O Come, All Ye Faithful/Adeste Fideles
For sake of consistency, and because I enjoy using it, I’ve decided to employ Grok as a summary engine, mainly to do the research and to keep each summary more or less consistent. The copypasta is as follows:
“Please write me a 300-word summary of the Christmas song [name of song], including the year when it was written, the national origin of the composer, the national origin of the music, and the story behind the lyrics.”
Based on that, I’ll be able to put it in my own words and make sure I don’t leave out anything important.