Carols

Thursday

Rhys Laverty

Christmas carols don’t need modernising

From our UK edition

Like Ebenezer Scrooge, we are all visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past. At this time of year, people and events that have gone before feel closer at hand – both the personal and the historical. One of the main ways we experience this is through our tradition of Christmas carols. A recent YouGov survey showed that 14 per cent of Britons usually attend a carol service. Not as high as one would hope, but attendance rates are rising: in 2023, Church of England Christmas services alone saw a 20 per cent leap in attendance. I sense 2025 is already continuing the trend. Yet many churches will be pointlessly squandering the opportunity by continuing a fad which both turns off newcomers and lets down regulars: modernised Christmas carols.

Christopher Howse

Carols are much weirder than we think

From our UK edition

Why, my sharp-minded colleague Tom Utley once asked after a Telegraph Christmas Carol service, should anyone think God would abhor the Virgin’s womb? He was talking about the line in ‘O come, all ye faithful’ that goes: ‘Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb.’ Wasn’t it a bit weird? At last I found the answer in a book, Redeemer in the Womb, by the theologian John Saward, which brilliantly explores the unusual subject of what writers in the early Church thought about the months spent by Jesus in the Virgin Mary’s womb. A pagan presumption in the ancient world was that women’s insides were nasty and shameful.

Tuesday

Addison Del Mastro

The Christmas carol canon that could have been

Ah, Christmastime, the season for pheasant dinners, fancy ties, the land of Toyland from which you can never return, the time of year when everyone falls in love, when snowmen fly away to Snowland to become Eskimos, and when kids run around crying “dickory dock!” Right? All of these are bits and pieces from old Christmas songs that have mostly been forgotten, whose imagery and language failed to take hold in the general imagination. It’s quite fascinating how such a small number of songs, from a very narrow moment in American life, have contributed so heavily to defining the mood and feel of our secular Christmases.

Wednesday

Priscilla M. Jensen

Christmas at the manor

Virginia  Christmas will be different this year. Our refrigerator’s death was like Socrates’s: it began at the bottom and moved gradually upward, eventually yielding up its Freon eide to the empyrean, or at least the ozone hole. Such a death in early November raises big questions about holiday-making, or would most years, with Thanksgiving upon us and Christmas not far behind. But with COVID rampant, we’re admonished to stay home, and will, which dovetails conveniently with the fact that because of the virus, supply chains are banjaxed and we won’t get our new fridge till Boxing Day. (And refrigerator boxes are the best boxes, so there’s the grandchildren’s Christmas taken care of.

christmas manor

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

How we became a nation of choirs and carollers

From our UK edition

Between the ages of 15 and 17 I had a secret. Every Monday night I’d gulp down dinner before rushing out to the scrubby patch of ground just past the playing fields, where a car would be waiting. Hours later — long after the ceremonial nightly locking of the boarding house — I’d sneak back, knocking softly on a window to be let in. I’d love to say that it was alcohol or drugs that lured me out. It wasn’t even boys — or, at least, not like that. My weekly assignation was with Joseph and Johann, Henry, Ben and Ralph. My addiction? Choral music.