The History of Christmas Carols
Most of us grew up singing Christmas carols, learning the lyrics to classics such as Jingle Bells or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, at a very young age. But believe it or not, carols have been sung for thousands of years and didn’t start for the sake of Christmas. They were sang pagans who were celebrating Winter Solstice. Carols were accompanies by celebrations and people dancing around stone circles. This is why the word carol is actually has Greek roots, originally pronounced choraulein, meaning “an ancient circle dance performed to flute music.”
Because the carols became a custom and tradition, early Christians decided to take over the celebrations rather than ban them, changing out the songs for more Christian ones. In AD 129, a Roman Bishop said that a song called ‘Angel’s Hymn’ should be sung at a Christmas service in Rome. Soon many composers all over Europe started to write carols. However, not many people liked them as they were all written and sung in Latin, a language that the normal people couldn’t understand. By the time of the Middles Ages (the 1200s), most people had lost interest in celebrating Christmas altogether.
St. Francis of Assisi changed this in 1223, when he started his Nativity Plays in Italy. The plays included songs or ‘canticles’ that told a story during the play. The songs were typically written in the people’s language which then gave rise to carol’s popularity again among the masses. The earliest carol that was actually written down came out in 1410. Only a very small fragment of it still exists in historic records. The carol was about Mary and Jesus meeting different people in Bethlehem.
Most carols from this time and the Elizabethan period were untrue stories,