Carols were first sung in Europe thousands of years ago.

The word Carol actually means dance or a song of praise and joy! Carols used to be written and sung during all four seasons, but only the tradition of singing them at Christmas has really survived.

Christmas, remembering the birth of Jesus, then started to be celebrated at the same time as the solstice, so the early Christians started singing Christian songs instead of pre-Christian/pagan ones. In 129, a Roman Bishop said that a song called “Angel’s Hymn” should be sung at a Christmas service in Rome.

Another famous early Christmas Hymn was written in 760, by Comas of Jerusalem, for the Greek Orthodox Church. Soon after this many composers all over Europe started to write ‘Christmas carols’.

However, not many people liked them as they were all written and sung in Latin, a language that the normal people couldn’t understand. By the time of the Middles Ages (the 1200s), most people had lost interest in celebrating Christmas altogether.

This was changed by St. Francis of Assisi when, in 1223, he started his Nativity Plays in Italy. The people in the plays sang songs or ‘canticles’ that told the story during the plays.

Sometimes, the choruses of these new carols were in Latin; but normally they were all in a language that the people watching the play could understand and join in!

The new carols spread to France, Spain, Germany and other European countries.

The earliest carol, like this, was written in 1410. Sadly only a very small fragment of it still exists.

The carol was about Mary and Jesus meeting different people in Bethlehem.

They were usually sung in homes rather than in churches! Traveling singers or Minstrels started singing these carols and the words were changed for the local people wherever they were traveling. One carols that changed like this is ‘I Saw Three Ships’.

When the Puritans came to power in England in 1640s, the celebration of Christmas and singing carols was stopped. However, the carols survived as people still sang them in secret.

Carols remained mainly unsung until Victorian times, when two men called William Sandys and Davis Gilbert collected lots of old Christmas music from villages in England. Carols were sung as folk songs in places like pubs but they often weren’t thought of as ‘proper’ or ‘nice’ songs by the middle or upper classes.

Before carol singing in places like churches became popular, there were sometimes official carol singers called ‘Waits’.

These were bands of people led by important local leaders (such as council leaders) who had the only power in the towns and villages to take money from the public (if others did this, they were sometimes charged as beggars!).

They were called ‘Waits’ because they sang on Christmas Eve (This was sometimes known as ‘watchnight’ or ‘waitnight’ because of the shepherds were watching their sheep when the angels appeared to them.), when the Christmas celebrations began.

Also, at this time, many orchestras and choirs were being set up in the cities of England and people wanted Christmas songs to sing, so carols once again became popular in churches and concert halls.

Many new carols, such as ‘Good King Wenceslas’, were also written in the Victorian period.

New carols services were created and became popular, as did the custom of singing carols in the streets.

Both of these customs are still popular today! One of the most popular types of Carols services are Carols by Candlelight services.

At this service, the church is only lit by candlelight and it feels very Christmassy! Carols by Candlelight services are held in countries all over the world.

1512 Spanish Crown issues the Laws of Burgos, governing the conduct of settlers with regards to native Indians in the New World

1657 “Flushing Remonstrance” petition signed in the Dutch colony of New Netherland, protesting the ban on Quaker worship

1939 Between 20,000 and 40,000 die in magnitude 8 earthquake in Erzincam, Turkey

1945 International Monetary Fund formally established by 29 member countries based on ideas of Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes

1949 Queen Juliana of the Netherlands grants independence to Indonesia

1979 After invading Afghanistan two days earlier Soviet forces pull off a coup in Kabul, killing President Hafizullah Amin

Historical Events Today Events In 2022

Today In Film & TV

1947 1st “Howdy Doody Show” (Puppet Playhouse), telecast on NBC

Today In Music

1932 Radio City Music Hall opens in New York City

Today In Sport

1981 Oiler Wayne Gretzky becomes fastest NHLer to get 100 pts (38th game)

1845 Ether 1st used in childbirth in US in Jefferson, Georgia

2012 NASA unveils plans to capture a 500 ton asteroid in 2025

Famous Weddings

1925 Inventor George Gallup (24) weds Ophelia Smith Miller

1950 American actor Henry Fonda (45) weds socialite and third wife Susan Blanchard (22) in New York City; divorce in 1956

1953 Broadcasting pioneer Roone Arledge (22) weds Joan Heise at St. Frances de Chantal Parish in Wantagh, New York

Nobody is really sure when Fir trees were first used as Christmas trees. It probably began about 1000 years ago in Northern Europe.

The first documented use of a tree at Christmas and New Year celebrations is argued between the cities of Tallinn in Estonia and Riga in Latvia! Both claim that they had the first trees; Tallinn in 1441 and Riga in 1510.

Evergreen trees (and other evergreen plants) have traditionally been used to celebrate winter festivals for thousands of years.

Christmas Trees might well have started out as ‘Paradise Trees’ (branches or wooden frames decorated with apples).

These were used in medieval German Mystery or Miracle Plays that were acted out in front of Churches during Advent and on Christmas Eve. In early church calendars of saints, 24th December was Adam and Eve’s day.

The Paradise Tree represented the Garden of Eden. It was often paraded around the town before the play started, as a way of advertising the play. The plays told Bible stories to people who could not read.

Christmas Trees as they came to be now started around the late 1400s into the 1500s. In what’s now Germany (was the Holy Roman Empire then), the Paradise Tree had more decorations on it (sometimes communion wafers, cherries and later pastry decorations of stars, bells, angels, etc. were added) and it even got a new nickname the ‘Christbaum’ or ‘Christ Tree’.

In the town square of Riga, the capital of Latvia, there is a plaque which is engraved with “The First New Year’s Tree in Riga in 1510”, in eight languages.

In 1584, the historian Balthasar Russow wrote about a tradition, in Riga, of a decorated fir tree in the market square where the young men “went with a flock of maidens and women, first sang and danced there and then set the tree aflame”.

There’s a record of a small tree in Breman, Germany from 1570. It is described as a tree decorated with “apples, nuts, dates, pretzels and paper flowers”. It was displayed in a ‘guild-house’ (the meeting place for a society of business men in the city).

Cones On A Fir Tree

The first person to bring a Christmas Tree into a house, in the way we know it today, may have been the 16th century German preacher Martin Luther. A story is told that, one night before Christmas, he was walking through the forest and looked up to see the stars shining through the tree branches.

It was so beautiful, that he went home and told his children that it reminded him of Jesus, who left the stars of heaven to come to earth at Christmas. So he brought a tree into his house and decorated it with candles to represent the stars.

Some people say this is the same tree as the ‘Riga’ tree, but it isn’t! The story about Martin Luther seems to date to about 1536 and Riga tree originally took place a couple of decades earlier.

The custom of having Christmas trees could well have travelled along the Baltic sea, from Latvia to Germany. In the 1400s and 1500s, the countries which are now Germany and Latvia were them part of two larger empires which were neighbors. Fir, or other evergreen trees like conifers, were common throughout northern Europe at this time, so that’s why firs and conifers became the ‘standard’ Christmas Tree.