Yellow's Favourite Christmas Carols To Carry You Through The Festive Season This Year
by Karl Azzopardi
Do you hear that ringing in your ear? No need to go running to your GP, it's just that time of year again when our senses are bombarded with everything Christmas. From colourful flashing lights to heartwarming scents of freshly baked minced pies and, of course, the month-long barrage of Christmas songs and carols!
Some people love them, blasting their favourite Christmas albums right after Halloween while others see them as the literal nightmare before Christmas. Considering we're writing a whole article about Christmas carols you can assume which people we side with here at Yellow.
So, in the true spirit of Christmas, we have compiled a playlist with our team's international and national favourites to get you in the festive mood. But first, let's dive into some fun facts about Christmas music, where it started and how it's evolved over the years.
The First Bells That Jingled
Though we are accustomed to Christmas songs and carols that speak of the birth of Jesus Christ, such music has deeply pagan roots. It is a well-known fact that towards the end of each season people used to gather to sing and dance, praising the gifts given by the previous season while welcoming the start of another. The Winter Solstice celebrations were known as Yule and took place along the last two weeks of December leading up to the new year — seems like they were already thinking about the Christmas shutdown period back then!
With the rise of Christianity, these pagan songs and celebrations were adapted into religious hymns depicting the birth of Jesus Christ from as early as the 2nd century. This led to the production of numerous Latin chants which had spread all over Europe by the 8th century as the church expanded its reach. However, Latin wasn't a common language and the tradition quickly died out in the Middle Ages. Its revival is mostly credited to Frances of Assisi in the early 1200s who is believed to have incentivised the rise of Christmas carols — festive religious chants sung in the country's native tongue.
The Rise of Popular Christmas Songs and Carols
Countries all over Europe started adopting this tradition from Italy to France, Germany and, later on, England which is where most of the popular Christmas songs we know today stem from. In fact, songs like 'The 12 Twelve Days of Christmas' and 'O Christmas Tree' date back to the 16th century. And it wasn't much later until Malta picked up on this tradition with the oldest Maltese Christmas carols dating back to the 1800s.
One of the very first and most well-known Maltese Christmas songs is 'Ninni la Tibkix Izjed' (also known as 'Il-Benniena ta' Gesù Bambin'). This local favourite was written in 1846 by the Jesuit priest Indri Schembri during his time in Algiers, dedicating it to those Maltese who had emigrated to Tunis. It was highly popularised in the following century as it was a common song to sing during local Christmas processions which Dun George Preca initiated in the 1920s. Many others followed after that, including 'O Gesù Helwa Tarbija' and 'Ninu Ninu tal-Milied' together with translations of famous carols like 'Ningabru Nsara' — the Maltese rendition of 'O Come All Ye Faithful'.
On the other side of the world, following the Great Depression era of the 1930s, America was building its own Christmas song traditions by taking the focus away from Christian themes and producing carols which focused more on Western Christmas customs. Perfect examples of this are 'Santa Claus is Coming To Town', 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' and 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas'. This snowballed into a whole industry with Christmas hits from beloved artists like Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey hitting top music charts all over the world come December.
Here's a playlist compiled by our very own Christmas fanatics at Yellow where you can find the songs mentioned above alongside our all-time Christmas favourites. Now go grab a glass of mulled wine, put our playlist on shuffle and see if you can guess which Christmas jingle's playing!
An honourable mention goes to 'Gej il-Milied' by local legend Freddie Portelli which we, unfortunately, couldn't find on this platform.
