Every year to begin the Christmas season, one can hear Christmas songs played in almost every business. The songs permeate through almost every place a shopper visits.
With the Christmas holiday here, one must ask “where did Christmas songs originate?” Nobody plays songs for other holidays like Thanksgiving or Independence Day. What makes Christmas so different?
Carols originated in Europe thousands of years ago, though they weren’t always Christmas carols. Pagan songs were sung at winter solstice celebrations while people danced around stone circles. Interestingly enough, this is where the term “carol” originated. It derives from the old French word “carole” which meant a popular circle dance that was accompanied by singing.
They had a carol for every season. There were May carols and harvest carols, even though Christmas carols is the only tradition that really survived.
It is rumored that Saturnalia celebrations are the source of the current Christmas traditions, like wreaths, candles, feasts and gift giving. Saturnalia was an ancient Roman pagan festival that honored the agricultural God Saturn and occurred close to the winter solstice.
In the 9th and 10 centuries, Northern European monasteries wrote the Christmas hymn into a sequence of rhymed stanzas. Adam of Saint Victor, a Parisian monk, took popular music from the 12th century and turned them into the traditional Christmas carols.
Christianity came along and turned the pagan solstice tradition into a Christmas celebration and began singing to celebrate it. In 129, a Roman Bishop dubbed “Angel’s Hymn” as a Christmas song to sing during the Christmas service.
It wasn’t long after when composers all over Europe began writing Christmas carols, though not many people liked them because they were in Latin. That was not a language that many people knew. By the time the Middle Ages came along, many people had lost interest in celebrating Christmas, so the carols disappeared.
Fast forward to 1223, and Assisi’s nativity plays in Italy featured people singing songs that told the Christian nativity story. These new and improved carols spread to France, Germany, Spain and other European countries.
English Christmas carols emerged in 1426 in a work of John Awdlay, a Shropshire chaplain. It is rumored that he enlisted people to walk from house to house singing 25 Christmas carols, thus beginning the tradition of Christmas caroling.
Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans came to power in England in 1647, and celebrating Christmas was banished. Cromwell deemed the Christmas celebration as a pagan festival.
Even though it was considered illegal, people still sang them in secret.
“Jingle Bells” was originally named “The One Horse Open Sleigh” and was not well received when James Lord Pierpont wrote it in 1857. It took many years to become the popular Christmas carol it is today.