The Origins of Some of Our Best-Loved Christmas Carols and Hymns

Many of the songs that nowadays fill our hearts with the spirit of Christmas began as spontaneous exclamations of joy and gratitude from people whose names have long since been forgotten. Of those songs whose origins can be traced, many were considered proper hymns and were written down, soon after they were composed, and used for church services. The others were kept alive by the oral tradition, as carolers and other singing groups carried their words and melodies from house to house, town to town, and country to country.

"Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" was set to a Mendelssohn-Bartholdy composition entitled "Festgesang for Male Chorus and Orchestration". This music was written to celebrate the anniversary of the first printing press and made its debut in June 1840. Mendelssohn felt that the piece was better suited to a national subject - or general merriment - than to a sacred hymn. A perfect marriage was made, however, when the melodies were combined with words written a century earlier by Charles Wesley after he'd listened to the peeling of church bells on a Christmas morning. Wesley was the author of 6,000 poems, and the Christmas hymn created from "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" was to become his most enduring work. The song manages to evoke the popular gaiety that Mendelssohn thought appropriate for it while still holding to a lofty tone of reverence, and it is this blend of the playful and the sacred that made it so memorable, enabling it to endure as a popular Christmas ode for centuries.

When Bishop Phillips Brooks, rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity, was asked by his Sunday school children to write a Christmas song, he complied by composing "O Little Town of Bethlehem" in 1868. The church organist, Lewis Redner, who claimed that the melody had come to him in a dream on Christmas Eve, furnished the tune. The song was prepared in time for the service the very next day.

That well-worn maxim, "necessity is the mother of invention", is quite apt when used to describe the origins of the classic "Silent Night". A parish priest, Father Josef Mohr, composed the words to this haunting song on a night before Christmas Eve. The organ of his little church in Austria had been rendered useless, and he and his organist Franz Gruber had agreed that they should plan something special to take its place in the midnight mass.

Father Mohr returned home late that evening, pausing along the way to reflect upon a hill overlooking the town. Snowy mountains rose behind him and the faint lights of the town glimmered in the valley below. Profound stillness lay all around, and he mused aloud that it was much like the silent, holy night in Bethlehem. Inspired, he hurried home and wrote late into the night. In the morning he read the resulting poem to Franz Gruber, who heard a melody as if from a choir of angels in his head, complementing the beautiful words. The congregation that heard the first-ever rendition of "Silent Night" that Christmas Eve, with Mohr's singing and Gruber's guitar, sat enthralled - and they soon forgot all about the missing organ music.