Newbie Poll: Christmas Carols & Holiday Songs

[mutepointe]

Well? Holidays songs don't just jump out of musical instruments, you know.

[Tikva]

Uhm, well, call me a "Grinch", but I'm not particularly fond of Christmas Carols. When I was younger, my parents and relatives used to press me for playing some holiday tunes on my clarinet, but that's not what put me off them. It's just that they start playing them on the radio by the beginning of November! That's like selling Christmas Cookies by the end of September. When the time comes, I'd had to listen to them so often that I'm annoyed to no end. There's just no way I can picture myself ever playing some on the whistle.

[Mick Down Under]

Christmas carols would be high on the list of many good christians I suppose, but not being a christian those sorts of songs aren't high on my list of must learn priorities. Having said that, Silent night and God rest ye merry gentleman sound very nice on a tinwhistle.


Mick

[MusicalADD]

My Christmas tunes anecdote:

Last year, back when I was still dabbling in musical styles other than ITM, I was in something of a band. Well... a trio. To call it a band seems inappropriate as we never played out anywhere.

I tried to get us all to an open mic, but the others dragged their feet, as they wanted to get "better" first. But someone suggested, "Let's work on a set of Christmas tunes. That will give us a very specific goal, and a very specific time frame. Because there's no way we're going to be able to play Christmas tunes after Christmas. So, we'll have a drop-dead time limit that will force us go to those open mic nights!"

It sounded like a plan. But, the foot dragging continued. "We've got two arrangements we all like, and it's December 3rd, so we should go play out this week, right?" I'd ask.

Well, not so simple, they said. Sure, the open mic USUALLY only gives you two songs. But, what if they like us so much they let us stay up for a third song? That would be embarrassing... we'd better polish that third arrangement just in case.... so, no, let's not play at open mic this week. Maybe next week. What's the hurry?

Maybe we should have just done simpler tunes, but we'd picked things like Carol of the Bells, which sounded to us like it called for a 3-part arrangement, so the polishing took time.

Fast forward to the week before Christmas, our last chance to play at open mic. All is set to play at our favorite open mic, around December 19. Finally, we'll play out in public!

Except: blizzard, heavy snow all afternoon, over half a foot. Canceled. The next open mic, on Christmas Eve, was of course out of the question.

So we never did play out. All that arranging and practicing, for nothing.

Well, not quite nothing. We had a friend make a youtube video of us:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTVKCpjgtPQ
We Three Kings, into Carol of the Bells. Playing it back now, I really like how the latter came out.

And this year, as Christmas approaches... one of the guys is a new dad. No more time for practice.

So my experience is: don't invest a lot of time in fancy complex Christmas arrangements, you just won't have enough opportunities to play them.

[walrii]

A year or so ago, I gathered several dozen traditional carols and practiced them on both the recorder and whistle. I mostly learned them because, being familiar, they were easy to learn. Last year we visited with my wife's family at Thanksgiving, five families all in one house and no one wanted to put up with any whistle playing. Most of her family isn't into Christmas other than as a holiday so I got up very early one morning and went out back to practice the carols. My mother-in-law, who loves Christmas and everything about it, came out with her coffee and listened for the better part of an hour. Needless to say, that morning made the Christmas season for both of us.

A few weeks later, we visited my sons and their families and my granddaughter saw my recorder. She'd had the usual introduction to music on the recorder in school and was interested. I told her to get her recorder and taught her the first part of "Deck the Halls."

Learn some carols. You already know them by heart, they sound great on the whistle (or the recorder) and somewhere, sometime you'll be very glad you did.

[Welshman]

I am afraid I am one of those nauseatingly happy (ho - ho - ho) Christmas freaks that goes berserk as the season approaches. My family always run for cover from mid-September onward (my son's birthday is September 17th and that means that open season starts on the 18th) as I start playing Christmas tunes from then.

Unfortunately for them I always take a long break before Christmas too - December 15th, or thereabouts to January 4th, so as a result I am around the house all the time. Now you can only play Jingle Bells so many times without sounding tedious - I know I sound like that anyway. My solution is to seek out old traditional folksy Christmas anthems - and thank God, the Watersons, amongst others, have been a great help in that respect. But the web is also a huge arsenal of international carolling.

So when you pass that poor soul tooting away "Away in a Manger" in early October, think of my poor family - they'l have another 3 months before I let them escape -no reprieve and no pardon. At least you'll only toot out the odd tune.

I wonder if I could rearrange Silent Night to 6/8 time and take it along to my local session

[Dameon]

I worked at Wal-Mart for two Christmases. Imagine hearing nothing but Christmas carols, 10-12 hours a night, from the day after Thanksgiving until January. I absolutely hate Christmas carols, and will only play them off of sheet music when busking around Christmas. Even then I can only force myself to play two or three in a one hour set.

[Mick Down Under]

Evem though it had no whistle playing in it whatsoever, and it looks like it was recorded sometime in the 1800's. I must say I enjoyed your youtube link musicalADD.


Mick

[Dragonwhistle]

I'm a big fan of traditional carols, the coventry carol, the wexford carol, Holly and the Ivy, Deck the halls, away in a manger, Noel, etc.

I don't really make Santa, rudolph, Let it snow, or any of that a part of my personal holidaying. Call me a Grinch, but we have no snow where I live, and since outgrowing Santa I've found a much more exciting meaning in the ancient traditions of Holy Christmastide and Yule/solstice time as a whole.

That said, I love to play the carols I'm fond of on my whistles. They sound positively unearthly if done right.

[Innocent Bystander]

Christmas carols would be high on the list of many good christians I suppose, but not being a christian those sorts of songs aren't high on my list of must learn priorities. Having said that, Silent night and God rest ye merry gentleman sound very nice on a tinwhistle.


Mick

Our Pagan Moot gets together at Yule and sings songs with pagan themes, set to tunes apparently also in use as tunes for Xian Carols. We have a Pagan Carols Songbook. I've been trying to get them to try a version of the Boar's Head Carol, without success. Usually they're keen on anything if you tell them it's old.

Maybe I can get them to do Skolion of Sekilos...

[jim stone]

I make lots of money busking these tunes in dec,
they're old, beautiful and sound great on our
instruments. Even new ones like santa is coming
to town are fun.

[MTGuru]

Christmas Eve and The Piper in the Meadow Straying are always good to pull out at Christmastime. Also the Wren Boys' Song (aka The Wren in the Furze). These and others are on the Chieftains' Christmas album "The Bells of Dublin".

[ketida]

The trio I work with has several sets of Christmas songs and tunes that we work into our regular line-up. I don't think I'd want to play just holiday material for hours (or, egads, months) on end.