It’s the most wonderful time of the year

Most people agree that there is something special about Christmas music. Perhaps it’s the feel-good spirit, the abundant joy inherent in its melodic patterns or its ability to bring a smile to even the crankiest of curmudgeons. Christmas songs and carols are amongst the most recognised pieces of music, not surprising really given that they are on radio stations and in every public place you can think of for nearly a quarter of the year. A true sense of Christmas music’s popularity can be illustrated by the fact that Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ was, until recently, the best selling record of all time.

Although hymns about Christmas are known to have existed in Roman Times it wasn’t until the 13th century, around the time of St Francis of Assisi, that songs celebrating the birth of Jesus became popular. It would be a few centuries later before many of the songs we still cherish today like ‘The First Noel’ and ‘Hark The Herald Angels Sing’ would arrive (both appeared in print for the first time in 1833) with the formalised practise of singing Christmas carols in churches starting in England in 1880.

The purpose of our website is to comprehensively catalogue every song that was ever written about the season of goodwill. So while we’ll focus in on secular standards such as Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ and well known carols like ‘Away In A Manger’ we’ll also focus on those compositions that have been lost to the mists of Christmastime. Not only that but you will also find details on the numerous covers that have been recorded for individual songs; like ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ which seems to be adopted by a different artist each new December.

Christmas-songs.net is not only text and information though as nearly every page on our website includes at least one music video. Our jukebox feature takes this one step further by aggregating all of the videos across the site onto one page. We will be introducing more and more features as we near our favourite season of the year so make sure you drop back regularly.

Given that every year brings a plethora of new festive records this website will be forever in a state of work in progress. We understand that we’ll miss important recordings along the way so we’d love you to get involved by letting us know about your undiscovered gems.