Behind Some of Your Favourite Christmas Songs

Christmas is a time when we come together to listen to and sing our favourite Christmas songs. But what is the story behind them? Today, we’re exploring the stories behind some of your favourite Christmas songs.

Jingle Bells

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The enduring popularity of “Jingle Bells” is probably due to the fact that it changes to suit popular tastes. Written by James Pierpont perhaps as early as 1850 in Massachusetts, it was published in 1857 under the title “The One Horse Open Sleigh”. It was an instant hit, but people kept calling it Jingle Bells, and the title stuck. People who bought and performed the music made little changes to the tune of the chorus, so that by the beginning of the twentieth century, it sounded almost completely different. Those changes must have worked, because the tune has been pretty much the same since.

Good King Wenceslas

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This carol tells the story of the Duke of Bohemia. He sees his peasants starving and freezing, so he sends them food and wood to burn. This story is likely untrue, as the song’s story was written in 1847, and the duke lived in the early tenth century.

Still, the story behind the story is pretty interesting. Václav Alois Svoboda, a Czech poet, wrote the poem in 1847. He translated the Czech story into German and Latin tried to pawn the three translations off as old manuscripts. His aim was to lend the legitimacy of age to Czech literature, but it was quickly discovered that the story was modern (at that time). Nonetheless, the tale remained popular, and it eventually made its way to the UK. There, JM Neale translated the poem and set it to the tune of an old Nordic hymn celebrating spring: Tempus Adest Floridum (‘It is time for flowering’). That tune really was old, though. Neale discovered it in a collection of religious songs call the Piae Cantiones, which was published in 1582.

Silent Night

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“Silent Night” is an Austrian hymn. The lyrics were written by Father Joseph Mohr in 1816, but the song didn’t get a tune until he finally showed the lyrics to his friend Franz Xaver Gruber in 1818. The song was originally composed to be sung with a guitar accompanying, but that proved controversial, as guitars were tavern instruments at the time. So Gruber made an arrangement for the organ, and that’s how the song spread. Travelling organ repairman Karl Mauracher took the song to different parts of Austria around 1820, and eventually it fell into the hands of two popular singing families, the Strasser family and the Rainer family. The Strassers took it to Leipzig in 1832, and the Rainers debuted it in New York City in 1839.

The song was translated into English in 1863. By the time of World War I’s Christmas Truce in December 1914, it was so well known that the soldiers on both sides of the conflict could sing it together – albeit in different languages.

Once in Royal David’s City

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This tune, called the most listened-to Christmas carol, was written by the wife of an Anglican bishop, Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander. She wrote it to help the children she taught understand the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth, but she never intended it to be a famous Christmas carol, even after it was published in 1848. It was part of her collection, Hymns for Little Children, which incidentally also contains “All Things Bright and Beautiful”.

HJ Gauntlett wrote the tune for the song, having previously worked with Felix Mendelssohn on his 1846 oratorio, “Elijah”. That musical pedigree is probably the reason the carol always opens the King’s College Cambridge’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

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Sometimes the happiest songs have the saddest stories behind them, and that is certainly the case with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”. Back in 1936, Evelyn May, wife of copywriter Robert May, contracted cancer. Over the next two years, she battled the disease, and by November 1938, it had left her bedridden. Around this time, Robert, who had been picked on as a child and grew up to have a middling career while his friends were all quite successful, had been asked by his supervisor to create a short story for the Montgomery Ward department store’s Christmas booklet. One day, Robert and Evelyn’s four-year-old daughter Barbara asked why her mommy was so different to others’, and Robert, knowing what it felt like to feel so alone and sad as a child, began to tell her the story he was creating. It was a mix between The Ugly Duckling and various Christmas tales, and she loved it so much, she asked him to tell it over and over. In this way, he was able to perfect the story before presenting it as the completed poem to his boss for approval. During this time, Evelyn died, so he missed the Christmas 1938 deadline, but his colleagues liked the story enough to approve it for the 1939 one.

The poem, in which a deer, rejected by his peers for being odd, saves Christmas, was an instant hit, and in the following years, Montgomery Ward printed more than 6 million copies of the poem and even began producing Rudolph-related merchandise. Because Robert was an employee, however, he didn’t see any money from his creation until the store gave him the rights in 1946. It was then that he got his brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, to turn the poem into a children’s song. After sending the song to various stars of the time, including Bing Crosby and Perry Como, they eventually convinced Gene Autry to record it in 1949 – thanks to a bit of a push by Autry’s wife. His version was a massive hit, and it has remained one of the best-selling singles of all time.

 

These five songs are all classic Christmas tunes, and they each have their own unique tales. But we haven’t even scratched the surface on the stories behind your favourite Christmas songs. Which ones do you want to know about?