Our tradition of Christmas songs and carols contains some of the most moving reflections on the Christian story. It also contains songs like “Jingle Bells.”

Our Christmas songs and carols turn up in some surprising places. They come from some surprising places, too — certainly not all of them began life with their seasonal associations attached. Some were born to Christmas, some have achieved Christmas, and some have had Christmas thrust upon them.

Songs repurposed for Christmas

Carol singers in England will find themselves singing a song whose original words were about a dead cow and a delinquent plough boy. The story of this carol begins in Philadelphia. Phillips Brooks was a clergyman and a fine poet. He gave the funeral oration for the assassinated president Abraham Lincoln and took a pilgrimage to the Holy Land soon after the end of the Civil War.

Brooks describes a visit to Bethlehem, and the peace he found at the shrine where Jesus was born. When he got home, he wrote a poem about the experience, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and had it set to music by his own church organist, Lewis Redner (who was a real estate salesman during the week). Redner’s tune, known as “St Louis,” is the one regularly sung in the U.S. today.

Forty years later, we meet the wicked plough boy and the mistreated oxen. This typically colorful folksong was heard in a pub in Forest Green, Surrey by the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, sung to him by an old man called Mr. Garman. Vaughan Williams found a use for the tune when he was given the job of music editor of the English Hymnal. He wanted to include Phillips Brooks’ verse, but didn’t know (or didn’t like) Redner’s tune. So Vaughan Williams helped himself to Mr. Garman’s folksong. The result is the version of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” sung today in the UK.

Songs that worry theologians

That’s not the only transatlantic immigrant into the English carol repertoire. “We Three Kings” is American. So is “Away in a Manger,” which was first published in the journal of the Universalist movement. The editors confidently informed their readers that the poem was by Martin Luther — it isn’t. They made that up. They claimed they were celebrating the 400th anniversary of Luther’s birth — they weren’t. They made that up, too (or, at least, got the date wrong).

These two American songs introduce us to a couple of other important strands in the story. Both were written for children. Both contain details that have worried theologians. Critics of “We Three Kings” point out that Scripture doesn’t say the Kings were three in number, only that they brought three gifts. Likewise, many people have criticized “Away in a Manger” because the verse The little Lord Jesus no crying he makes treats the Christ child as less than fully human by denying him all the attributes of a human child.

This is not the place to solve these theological controversies, except perhaps to say that the entire Christmas tradition is basically an imaginative embellishment of the story in the gospel of St. Luke. We sing about midwinter and snow happily enough, but they’re not in the Bible either.

A tune by many other names

“O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Away in a Manger” are both sung today to different tunes on either side of the Atlantic. Many of our best-known carol texts have had many musical partners over the years. Different tunes sometimes represent differences between one denomination and another, or from one village to the next. Sometimes, a carol would be sung to one tune in church and to a different tune in the pub afterward.

It’s all a gloriously eccentric English muddle. Take, for example, this list:

“Old Foster”
“Tom’s Boy”
“Old Beer”
“Morchard Bishop”
“Sweet Chiming Bells”
“Cambridge New”
“Fern Bank”
“Comfort”
“Hail! Chime on”

Are those names of ales? Cricket teams? Characters in Harry Potter?

Actually, they’re tunes. All have been sung, at various times and in various places, to “While Shepherds Watched.” There are many others, (including “Cranbrook,” better known as “On Ilkla Moor Baht ‘At.”) Some are deeply mysterious and profoundly moving, like the elegiac “Shropshire Funeral Hymn.”

Often, tunes turn up in different parts of the country in slightly different versions. The composer John Stainer once heard “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” raggedly sung on the streets of the capital by a tattered band of Dickensian urchins. A little later, the folklorist Cecil Sharp collected the same tune in Cambridge. The same, but different: Stainer’s tune has a different first note from Sharp’s.

Somebody, once upon a time, travelled those 50 miles singing carols and got that bit wrong, or misremembered it, or changed it. That’s how an oral tradition works. There is no “correct” version. Even today, hymn books and carol collections don’t agree on the exact words of “Away in a Manger” or the precise rhythm of “Angels from the Realms of Glory.”

Carols not allowed in church

This ability to absorb influences from everywhere and nowhere produces memorable results. Some of the imagery remains defiantly secular. The opening verse of “The Holly and the Ivy” is a fertility song, about the promise of new life in the depths of winter.

This partly explains why, for most of its history, the English carol has been an outdoor creature, kept tied up in the churchyard, not allowed to show its muddy face in church. Good King Wenceslas used to look in, not out. For most of the eighteenth century only one carol was permitted in worship, Tate and Brady’s “While Shepherds Watched.” Hymns like “O Come, All Ye Faithful” weren’t granted access until the first half of the nineteenth century. Even long after that, the idea of singing secular things like “wassail” songs cheek-by-jowl with holy writ would have been deeply shocking.

So next time you clamber to your feet to hear once again those familiar old tunes banged out on a wheezy organ or cracked school piano, remember just how English this most English of traditions actually is: not very. “Ding, Dong, Merrily on High” began life in a French Renaissance dancing manual: (“pied gaulche largy, pied droit approché, empoigner la femme par le saulx du corps, l’eslevant en l’air”, which means “put your left foot out, put your right foot in, pick her up by the waist and twirl her around a bit”).

The tune of “Good King Wenceslas” was first published in Finland to words about the coming of spring. Remember Bishop Brooks, finding peace from the horrors of the Civil War in the Holy Land, at the birthplace of Christ, where the silent stars go by. Remember the dead cow and the naughty plough boy, carried off to hell by a genie in a puff of blue smoke — all very festive. Remember Mr. Garman of Forest Green, Surrey.

And what about “Jingle Bells”? That one’s American, too, composed by a man who ran away to sea at age 14 in a whaling ship, lost everything in the Gold Rush of ‘49, and was the uncle of the founder of the J.P. Morgan banking house. A “carol” used to be just a party song, about love, keeping warm, or having a good time. Shakespeare uses the word that way. “Jingle Bells” can surely claim its place in that tradition.

This wonderful, rich, musical pudding gives us a unique insight into what makes us who we are. Even more importantly, they give us lots of great tunes.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.