Deck the Halls
Christmas Carols Explained, #7
“Deck the Halls” is part of the time-honored English tradition of adapting music that is originally Welsh and passing it off as their own, because nobody off the island can tell the difference. Unfortunately for the English, they picked the wrong tune because this Welsh classic is actually a New Year’s song written in welsh by a guy named John Hughes. Not the ‘Home Alone’ one. The lyrics as we have them today are from the 1860s, by an Englishman named Thomas Oliphant.
The whole point of this track is to decorate, celebrate, put on your bright colors and just run around like a 9 year-old who’s all smacked-out on candy canes. It’s a hype song for the season. One particularly telling line, “heedless of the wind and weather,” really drives home the dab-on-my-haters attitude of it all, telling you to spaz out and have a great time no matter what. I can appreciate that.
I’m not adamantly committed to any particular arrangement here, I’ll just say that this was the first track on the first Mannheim album my parents bought when I was a kid, so I’ve attached a lot of fond memories to it. This is part of the perennial soundtrack in my head whenever I think of Christmas and thus I’ll choose that version here.