re did our Christmas carols come from?

He was a descendent of the original Pilgrims, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, a clergyman of some renown. He wrote religious books and was coeditor of a magazine called Monthly Religious Magazine (1859-1871). In 1849, Edmund Hamilton Sears wrote a poem called “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” It was published in the Christian Register. In 1850, Richard Storrs Willis, a Yale graduate who had studied in Germany with Felix Mendelssohn, wrote the tune.

When I was a small child, we celebrated Christmas in our home on Christmas Eve. Our Swedish smorgasbord was followed by the singing of carols. We each had our favorite. For my grandfather it was “Var Halsad Skona Morgonstund” (“All Hail to Thee, O Blessed Morn”), a hymn he learned in Sweden as a boy.

“Morgonstund” was based on an old German hymn of the 1620s. It was rewritten by Johan O. Wallin in 1819. Ernst W. Olson translated the hymn into English in 1901. Music for the hymn was written in 1599 by Phillip Nicolai.

What would Christmas be without the singing of carols? In shopping malls, caroling door-to-door or in church services (like the Julotta of my childhood), Christmas carols express the message of Christmas. But when did we start caroling? Where did the custom come from?

Most of us assume the first carolers were the angels who sang to the shepherds on a hillside in Bethlehem. The oldest known carol was written in the fourth century by St. Ambrose around the time the Catholic Church made December 25 Christmas Day.

After that, almost 1,000 years passed before other carols were written. In fact, the oldest known carol in the English language—still sung today—is “The First Nowell.” This popular song came in the early 1500s from Cornwall, England. No one knows who wrote it.

The word “carol” originally meant “round dance.” In Greek, it was called “charos.” In old English it was “kyrriole,” in French “carole.” As time went on the carol became a joyful religious song. Now it refers to a song sung exclusively at Christmas.

Other songs from the 1500s-1600s include “Deck the Halls,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “I Saw Three Ships” and “O Tannenbaum” (“O Christmas Tree”), just to name a few.

One of these carols would have been long forgotten if it had not been for England’s Queen Victoria. In 1846, she established the custom of the decorated Christmas tree. When the Germans contributed “O Tannenbaum” to our catalog of carols, it had only one verse. Then, because of Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree, two verses were added by German poet Ernst S. Anschutz.

One of the most powerful rulers of the 16th century was King Philip II of Spain. He is known for the Spanish Armada of 1588 and the establishment of the Douai College in France. Douai College was important because of the Douay Version of the Old Testament. But Douai is also known as the birthplace of one of the most popular carols of all time.

During the 18th century, an Englishman moved to Douai to teach music and make calligraphic copies of ancient hymns. John Francis Wade’s beautiful hymn copies were carried all over Europe. Sometime in the 1740s, Wade composed his own hymn in Latin. The four stanzas were called “Adeste Fideles,” but because of his reputation as a calligrapher, no one believed he had written the song himself.

It was attributed to many different composers, but there was no good answer. In the 1780s it was brought to England and introduced in the chapel at the Portuguese Embassy. A clergyman, Frederick Oakeley, translated it into English. It wasn’t until 1947 that researchers discovered that Wade was indeed the song’s composer—words and music.

The 19th century in America brought many more carols. In 1885, in the Lutheran churches of the Pennsylvania Dutch country, a song came into being that was attributed to Martin Luther and often called “Luther’s Cradle Hymn,” but it was not; it lacks his musical style. Most music researchers say James Ramsey Murray composed “Away in a Manger,” but as late as 1980 some still insisted it was Luther’s song.

Phillips Brooks was the most talented preacher of the 19th century. He held his congregation steady during the Civil War. He gave the sermon in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral. Toward the end of his life he became the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts. But his fame comes from writing a song, one most of us sing every Christmas. After the war, his church sent him on a sabbatical, and he traveled all over the world. He spent Christmas in the Holy Land and returned to America with “Palestine singing in his soul.”

When he returned he composed a hymn and asked his friend, organist Louis Redner, to write the music. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was introduced to the world in 1868 by the Sunday school children of Brooks’ congregation.

On Christmas Eve 1818, a pastor sat at his desk preparing his Christmas sermon. It wasn’t going well, so the pastor was upset when he heard a persistent knocking at his door. He opened the door to find one of the poorer members of his congregation. He asked the pastor if he would please come and visit a brand new baby and her mother.

Putting on a heavy coat, the pastor followed the man up into the foothills of Oberndorf, Austria. He was ushered into a crude hut and spoke a word of blessing to a lovely mother and her new baby. Trudging back down the path he was calmed by the beauty of twinkling stars and snow-covered mountains.

The visit he had just made somehow brought his mind back to the original Christmas story and that infant and his mother. As he walked on, the words in his head kept turning into rhyme. By the time Joseph Mohr reached his desk he had formed the lines of a simple poem. Hurriedly he scribbled the words onto a sheet of paper.

Again his coat went on, and out into the dark he went. He brought his poem to Franz Gruber, the other educated person in the town. The two were good friends. Gruber served as the town’s schoolmaster and as the organist for the little St. Nicholas Church. However, the mice had been at the organ, and it was out of commission. Mohr asked Gruber if he could write music to go with the words. So he wrote the music for two voices and a guitar.

On Christmas Day 1818, the congregation heard for the first time a carol that would be loved wherever Christmas is celebrated:

“Silent night, holy night,
all is calm, all is bright.”

Karen Sutherland is a member of College Church in Wheaton, Ill.