Lots of us have a hard time figuring out holiday music. We want something that evokes the sound of Yuletide music from our childhoods but we don’t want to be forced to celebrate a religious experience that we don’t share. So here’s a short list of some Pagan Yuletide music that you can share!
As if the Yuletide weren't already dangerous enough, here come the Thug Wassailers.
Forthwith, yet another comedic masterpiece by the Grand Master of satirical British faux-ksong, Sid Kipper, here heard in redoubtable performance by Blanche Rowen and Mike Gulst.
British composer Peter Warlock (b. Phillip Heseltine, 1894-1930) wrote this charming little lullaby as a Christmas carol in 1926. (You can hear the original here, in an arrangement by Andrew Carter.)
I've re-written the lyrics slightly—certainly it could still be sung as a Yule carol—to make it into a general, any-time lullaby for any boy-child: baby god, baby warlock, or otherwise.
For this I make no apologies. I suspect that a man who, because of his active interests in the occult, took the name "Warlock," would be delighted to know that witches were singing his song to their babies.
In 17th century Yorkshire, after the morning service on Christmas Day, people used to take hands and dance through the church shouting “Yule! Yule! Yule!”
I'll bet the vicar just loved that.
Crying Yule as a refrain to seasonal songs, chants, and dances is an old custom in the English-speaking world (as it still is in Scandinavia) with parallels in a number of non-Germanic cultures. To take just one example, a standard refrain in Latvian Midwinter carols is Kalado, Kalado; Kalado means “Christmas,” but it's yet another descendant of the wide-spread and influential Latin calendae, like Provençal Calena and Russian Kolyadá. The calends of January have much to answer for in the course of cultural (and linguistic) history.
Given its iconic centrality to the American celebration, it's always struck me as odd that the Yule tree has inspired so few carols. Off-handedly, I can think of only one, and that one is, shall we say... problematic.
William Sansome once remarked of O Tannenbaum that it's apparently impossible to make an English translation of this German children's song “that doesn't sound simple-minded.”
Listening to Alf Houkom's Rune of Hospitality the other day, it occurred to me that maybe we've been working in the wrong genre.
Thesseli
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