A Very British Christmas: Twelve Days of Discomfort and Joy. Rhodri Marsden

are the doorbell and the knocker… money is what they are after.’ Thankfully we’re not all as mean spirited as C. S.; some of us give carollers the benefit of the doubt, and see them as nobly extending an ancient British tradition of wassailing and mummers’ plays, rather than assuming that they’re about to vandalise our car.

       My choir does carol singing every year. Christmas doesn’t feel like it’s started until I’ve done it. We sing the same carols in the same order and the same things always go wrong. We only sing for about an hour, but you can get very cold in that time, so a bit of mulled wine (provided by a local shopkeeper) with a decent slug of brandy is part of the whole experience.

       One year some builders pulled up next to us and played techno out of their van. Another year someone turned all the lights out in their house when they heard us singing. But the reception is generally positive. We sing under lampposts rather than at people’s doors, and send whichever teenage child has been dragooned into helping out up to the doors with a bucket. There’s a certain amount of ‘I don’t have any change’, but people have been known to follow us down the street after we’ve left their patch in order to donate. You can see yourself making people’s Christmases.

       J. L., London

      In keeping with oral tradition, carols find themselves morphing and changing as we mishear words and get things wrong. For example, in ‘Silent Night’, Mary is not a ‘round, young virgin’; no, everything just happened to be ‘calm and bright’ around ‘yon virgin’, i.e. that virgin who’s sitting over there. In ‘Good King Wenceslas’, Wenceslas has three syllables, so he didn’t ‘last’ look out, he just looked out. (Bear with me, I’ll stop being angry in a second.) It’s not your ‘king’ you’re wishing a Merry Christmas, it’s your ‘kin’, i.e. your family, and in ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’, they’re not merry gentlemen you’re asking to have a rest,¹³ they’re gentlemen who ideally would ‘rest merry’, i.e. take it easy, have a good time, chill out, because after all, in the words of Noddy Holder, it’s Chriiiiiiiistmas.

      “Unprotected sex with strangers, fa la la la la la la la la…”

      More deliberate liberties are taken with other carols. A friend of mine tells me the story of her former headmistress who, for some reason, decided that the three verses of ‘Away In A Manger’ were insufficient and wrote a fourth for the school to sing. It ended thus: ‘the mouse squeaked in wonder and jumped from the corn, and lay by the manger where Jesus was born.’ (No, I’ve no idea either.) Words get changed for the purposes of mild amusement: the late 1930s saw kids address the weighty topic of the abdication crisis with ‘Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs Simpson’s pinched our king’; there’s the perennial favourite of ‘While shepherds washed their socks’, and in one version of ‘We Three Kings’ the Magi travel to Bethlehem in a taxi, a car, and on a scooter while beeping a hooter and either wearing a Playtex bra, or smoking a big cigar. That’s one hell of a welcoming committee for a baby boy.