The History of Christmas Caroling

The Christmas caroling tradition hails back as far as the 13th century. Carols were originally sung during secular communal celebrations like harvest tide, while the traditional music compositions at Christmas took the form of chants and hymns. The term “carol” actually means ‘a kind of dance’ in Old French, and lyrics were later joined to these festive dances to form the carols still sung today. Still later, these carols were performed in church and began to be specifically associated with Christmas.

Saint Francis of Assisi is credited with bringing carols into the formal worship of the church during a Christmas Midnight Mass in a cave in Greccio, in the province of Umbria in 1223. That night, the music that accompanied this sacred and formal event - all simple folk songs created by people from the countryside- were not hymns but carols. Carols became increasingly popular and spread across Europe when they were used in the mystery plays of the Middle Ages.

This casts some light on the history of the music itself, yet why do modern carolers wander neighborhoods singing to strangers? In the distant past, according to Sam Abramson in his essay on Christmas traditions, wandering minstrels traveled from hamlet to castle performing carols. In later years, villages had their own bands of minstrels called waits. Waits were watchmen who patrolled the streets of the old walled cities keeping guard against fire and singing out the hours of the night. During the holiday season, they would include some carols for the people along the way and demand treats (some people made it clear they’d rather get a good night’s sleep than have someone singing under the window!) Eventually the term was used to describe groups of musicians who sang and played for various civic events during the Christmas season.

The Golden Age of Popular Christmas Music

“Just like the ones I used to know.” This line from the song “White Christmas” is a fitting summary of the golden era of popular Christmas music, the majority written between the years 1942 and 1957. It is amazing to think of the cultural impact of this body of songwriting, all composed during a relatively brief 15 year period of American history.

As WWII waged on, the mood of the country was ripe for songs of togetherness and family. The release of Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” in 1942 perfectly captured that mood and that of the soldiers overseas. Brought to troops in the form of 78 r.p.m. records and included in "recreation kits" supplied by the military, the song was heard on Armed Forces Radio and played on jukeboxes at PX stores and USO halls; it served as a powerful reminder of why they were fighting. It went on to become the most recorded song in history, with Bing Crosby's version alone selling 31 million copies. The smash success of "White Christmas" started a trend of secular popular Christmas songs.

With the floodgates now opened, a steady stream of now classic Christmas songs began. "The Christmas Song" was written in 1945 by a 19-year-old Mel Torme and collaborator Bob Wells during a sweltering summer day in Palm Springs. They decided a good way to cool down would be to write a Yuletide tune, which they dashed off in a mere 40 minutes. When Bob Hope decided he wanted a Christmas song included in his 1951 movie The Lemon Drop Kid, he turned to the songwriting team of Jay Livingstone and Ray Evans, who balked at first, protesting that it was an almost impossible task because all the great Christmas songs had already been written. What they eventually came up with was the now classic "Silver Bells."

The holiday songs of this era were not all sentimental, however, as witnessed by singing cowboy Gene Autry’s three big Christmas hits, "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer," "Here Comes Santa Claus," and "Frosty the Snowman" - the first of which he almost passed up. When writer Johnny Marks presented him with the song, Autry called it the silliest song he ever heard. He had to be talked into recording it, doing it in one take and then washing his hands of it. He apparently changed his opinion of it soon thereafter, though, when it sold two million records in its first year. 1

1 Doug Gamble, “The Christmas Songs,” National Review Online, Dec. 2005.