For Boxing Day, I enjoyed this brief article in The TLS about the surprisingly modern history of carols. It turns out that singing them in church is a relatively modern innovation: they moved there from the village green as part of

the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century and its introduction of what might be called a performative inclusivity – try saying that after two glasses of the Archdeacon’s sherry – in Anglican worship. Get them in and singing, and they’ll feel more a part of things.

My latent assumption had always been that there was a long British tradition of carols, but in fact, most of them are from other places:

“Good King Wenceslas”, comes from a songbook of 1582, Piae Cantiones Ecclesiasticae et Scholastichae, by Jaakko Suomalainen, head of the Turku cathedral school in Finland? Or that both “We Three Kings” and “Away in a Manger” are American? The latter was published in a bulletin of the universalist movement, which falsely attributed the words to Martin Luther.

I had no idea.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.