Christmas Carols

I've enjoyed singing this Christmas, despite at one time feeling completely unprepared and unpractised. Where did all the time go?  Five carol concerts and the same number of carol services later, plus a bit of less formal singing in residential homes and the like, later (and with something of a Christmas cold to finish off), I'm pretty much all sung out. I've learnt a few new ones, and some of those will become favourites, I think, and I've revisited many of the old ones.

Of course, carol singing has become a very choral affair. Watching as I did the carols from King's this year, I was struck by the way in which every congregational carol now has to end with a descant that seemed in that particular case to completely lose the thread of the original tune. The descants seemed to have been specially written - I didn't recognise them, and I think that if we're going to have descants at all, we should use them sparingly, and maybe stick to some of the ones that have become traditional and well-liked, and with good reason. Sorry, Mr Cleobury; the rest of it was nice.

My grandpa hated descants, and some of that must have rubbed off. Fancying I knew a bit about carols, I did one of those little quizzes that turn up on Facebook, and scored fifteen out of fifteen, which pleased me, but at the same time I was annoyed, because several of the questions were in fact about secular Christmas songs, including a couple I'd never heard, so my maximum score was a bit fortuitous. The theme of the quiz was "well-loved carols", and I'm sad that the definition of "carol" has got so much diluted. "White Christmas", love it or hate it, is not a carol.

Strictly speaking, "O Come All Ye Faithful" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" (and many more) are not carols either, but Christmas hymns, written by known hands, and designed to be sung in church service. Carols were really a form of folk music, and they belong on the streets rather than in churches and cathedrals, sung by the village waits around the houses. They represent the people taking back the Christian story otherwise possessed by priests and prelates, and making that story their own. We have no idea who wrote the most ancient carols; some hymns did become carols, however: "While Shepherds Watched" is one such: written as a hymn, it was taken by the local waits and set to local tunes; we sang it this year to the Yorkshire tune more familiarly sung as "Ilkley Moor Bah't Hat".

Carols were holy words set to traditional dance tunes, so real carols have a good solid dance beat to them. In England as in the plygain tradition of Wales, different bands would have their own carols, and very much their own tunes . . . though of course the best ones might well be poached by other bands and so spread about the place. It occurs to me that songs by Slade, Wizzard and others might well have more of the carol about them, in one sense, than some of the Christmas hymns, being very much "of the people" . . . but of course, the essence of the carol is that it is a faith song, even if sung to what was originally a secular tune.

But the point I'd want to make is that, while I've hugely enjoyed singing choral carols this year, and I think our audiences have enjoyed hearing us, I'd hate to lose that vital ingredient of the "real" carol - that it's a song of the people with something of a subversive element to it, Christian faith sung in the ordinary tongue, and not the exclusive preserve of prelates or even of choirs.