Everybody loves a Christmas carol – and from Fairytale of New York to Good King Wenceslas, they’re a huge part of our holiday traditions in the countries all over the world that celebrate Christmas. We use them to source a little festive cheer when the nights are getting dark and the temperatures are dropping, or even just to help us make it through the last few weeks of work before the big day when all we want is to snuggle down with a festive latte and watch Die Hard. They’re also a big part of how religious worshippers celebrate Christmas, and represent a show of faith, as well as a seasonal practice.
Christmas music is a pretty big part of the holiday. At this time of year, Mariah Carey is at her most powerful, and even if you want to crawl under a rock and hide every time you hear Slade on the radio, Christmas music is pretty inescapable. But why is this holiday in particular so intensely tied up with the presence of music?
The answers lie, perhaps surprisingly, in the idea of literacy.
Something to remember is that in pre-twentieth century society, a lot of counties didn’t have a particularly literate population. Reading and writing simply weren’t seen as important skills for people to have for the most part. Labourers and manual workers weren’t required to have any literacy skills whatsoever, and even moving up into then middle-class occupations such as merchantry or artisan craftsmanship, few of them would have had reading skills even remotely on par with what we’d consider functional literacy today. The only people in society who would have been skilled readers and writers would have been the gentry and the clergy- and even then, many people religious circles wouldn’t necessarily have been as skilled in their native tongue as they were in ecclesiastical Latin, as this was pretty much the only language they used in a written sense. Even the people with strong reading and writing skills would be considered quite poor readers and writers by the standards that we uphold today, with no standardised spelling and grammatical systems to refer back to.
Song and verse therefore represented an important opportunity for the non-literate population to consume media, and be part of a social narrative. This is where we get oral storytelling traditions from, as well as a lot of the tenets of early church worship – they were created by people who would struggle to engage organically with anything written. The first religious Christmas carols can be traced to 4th-century Rome, but the idea of music specifically sung to celebrate the Christmas period really took hold during the early dark ages in the rest of Europe. During the 13th century, in France, Germany and Italy, a tradition of festive hymnals took hold under the influence of Saint Francis of Assisi; but in England, carols are thought to have started in the rural towns and villages that observed the tradition of winter wassailing, and migrated into church settings as the practice gained popularity.
Wassail is a tradition that has been practised in Britain and some parts of Ireland for centuries. It has its roots in pagan custom, and the practice of visiting orchards over winter to sing to the trees and the spirits in them to ensure a good harvest the following season. These songs were often raucous and sung loudly, accompanied by stringed and woodwind instruments crafted from whatever was to hand; as wassail’s core belief was that the power of music was a powerful weapon against all manner of folk evil. Revellers would also make what was known as a ‘hullabaloo’; a loud cacophony of clattering pots and pans and drums, used to frighten malevolent spirits away, and ‘ring out’ the Devil and his influence from the orchard. There are many wassailing songs that are still sung today, perhaps the most famous of them being the Christmas carol O, here we come a-Wassailing. Wassail songs are simple, and often are sung to folk melodies that have existed prior to the song’s words, making them simpler and more memorable to people without reading skills whose concept of the lyrics would have been entirely aural. (This was something that actually happened pretty frequently - think God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Greensleeves). But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a lot of skill involved too – a big part of the wassail was about passing on these songs and musical skills to the next generation in an era where textbooks didn’t exist, and not many people would have been able to read them if they did.
Christmas singing fell in and out of style during the 1300s and 1400s, but came back in a big way due to the Protestant Reformation in Europe, with the new Lutheran Church warmly welcoming the idea of music in worship - especially songs in simple vernacular language, breaking from the Catholic Church and the complex Latin song that had come before. As the tradition of the Wassail died out due to the decline of folk belief in England, the Victorians popularised the idea of ‘Carolling’ as a wholesome and godly way to celebrate the season, away from festive pastimes that encouraged indulgence in material wealth, food and alcohol. And that’s basically where our big focus on Christmas music comes from today!
Christmas Carols have their roots in a non-written tradition, the concept of which might seem more than a little alien to us today. They harken back to an era where reading and writing were skills only possessed by small portion of society, and demonstrate the importance of oral storytelling and gathering during the festive season, to share tales and break up the long European winters. It’s pretty heartwarming to think that these huge parts of festive tradition actually come from people who would have struggled to read – it can often feel like history was shaped by a rich and privileged literate few, and that ordinary people don’t really get a say in the way that history happens.
The carol is a wonderful example of the idea that reading and writing aren’t actually a huge part of a social narrative, and that things heard are just as valid a form of communication as things read. It’s something important to remember, especially when we live in a world with so much focus on the written – even in 2021, some people are snobby about people who find it easier to listen to spoken books instead of reading a paper copy, or prefer podcasts over reading through blog posts. But reading and writing are only parts of how we communicate, and although they’re skills that are important in an educational sense for opening gateways to jobs and careers, the alternative, non-written ways that we share things are actually just as important. And they’re sometimes the ones that hang on, too.
So the next time you hear a Christmas song blaring out from the speakers in your grocery store’s frozen vegetables section, or a group of glum-looking year 5 pupils hanging around the cenotaph singing Little Donkey, remember that this particular tradition isn’t based in the deeds of kings, laws passed and edicts written. It’s actually part of an alternative history of non-written communication by people with low literacy, whose innovation actually gifted us with a huge part of the way that we’ve celebrated Christmas and ended the year for well in excess of a thousand years.