A very old custom which remains today practically unchanged is Christmas carols, which is called calanda in Greek. Children, in groups of two or more, still make the rounds of houses singing carols, usually accompanied by the triangle or guitars, accordions or harmonicas.

The children go from house to house, knock on doors and ask: “shall we say them?” If the homeowner’s answer is yes, the kids sing their favourite carols for several minutes before finishing up with the wish, “And for the next year, many happy returns.” Years ago the homeowners offered the children holiday sweets and pastries, but today they usually give them some money.

The carols are sung on the eves of Christmas, New Year and Epiphany, and they are different for each holiday.

The word calanda stems from the Latin, calenda, which translates as “the beginning of the month.” It is believed that the history of caroling goes deep into the past and connects with ancient Greece. In fact, they have even found carols written in those distant past days which are similar to the ones sung today. In ancient times the word for carols was Eiresioni , and children of that era held an effigy of a ship which depicted the arrival of the god Dionysos. Other times they held an olive or laurel branch decorated with red and white threads, on which they would tie the offerings of the homeowners.

This Eiresioni song from the Homeric period can still be heard today - with small changes - in the carols of Thrace:

In this house we came of the rich-landlord

May its doors open for the wealth to roll in

The wealth and happiness and desired peace should enter

And may its clay jugs fill with honey, wine and oil

And the kneading tub with rising dough.

EPIPHANY CAROLS
Today is the lights and the enlightment
The happiness is big and the sanctification
Down the Jordan River
Sits our Lady the Blessed Virgin Mary
She carries an organ, a candle she holds
And pleads with St. John.
St. John lord and Baptist
Baptize this divine child of mine
I shall ascend to the heavens
To gather roses and incense
Good day, good day
Good day to you master and the missus.

In Greek > 
Ayios Vasilis erhete
Ke den mas katadehete
Apo, apo tin kesaria.
Si sa arhon, si sa arhondissa Kiria!
Vastaei penna ke harti
Zaharokandio zimoti
Harti, harti ke kalamari
Des kai eme, des kai eme, to pallikari!

To kalamari egrafe
Ti mira tou tin elege
Ke to, ke to harti milouse
To hriso, to hriso mas kariofili!

Arhiminia ki arhihronia
Psili mou dendrolivania,
Ke arhi, ke arhi kalos mas hronos.
Eklisia, eklisia, me t’ ayio throno!

Arhi pou vgike o Hristos
Ayios ke Pnevmatikos,
Sti gi, gi na perpatisi
Ke na mas, ke na mas kalokardisi!

In English >

Saint Basil comes,
And does not acknowledge us
From Caesarea.
You are, you are the mistress of the house!

He holds a pen and paper
And leavened sweets
Paper, paper and ink.
Look at me, look at me, the brave one!

The ink wrote
And told fortunes,
And the, and the paper spoke.
Our golden, our golden clove!

It is the first day of the month and the year,
My tall rosemary,
And from, and from the beginning a good year for us.
The church, the church with the holy throne!

Christ came in the beginning,
Holy and Spiritual;
On earth, on earth he walked
To give us, to give us good cheer!

I do love Christmas songs. Anything from the traditional carols to the tacky pop numbers by Wham!, Mariah Carey and the Chipmunks.

For those of you who don’t share my enthusiasm for kitsch, Pitchfork’s compiled a list of top new Christmas ditties you can listen to, by artists like The Killers, The Knife, Sufjan Stevens and Willie Nelson. The link to The Killers’ A Great Big Sled isn’t available in Oz so check that one out on YouTube.

You can also listen to the HypeMachine’s great aggregate of Christmas songs by the likes of The Flaming Lips, Coldplay, The Arcade Fire, Belle & Sebastian, Loretta Lynn, Snow Patrol, The Beatles, Weezer, The Kinks, Otis Redding, Death Cab for Cutie, Run DMC… and, er, Oscar the Grouch and the Swedish Chef.

Beck, Chris Martin and their animal friends have also got a Christmas concert for you to watch.

For the purists, there’s always Christmas karaoke.

Enjoy!

For most of us, Christmas music is bound up with that nice mixture of emotional wooziness and enjoyable aching in the throat you get at a carol service.

Nostalgia is really the keynote of much Christmas music. Bing Crosby’s White Christmas sets the tone. It’s all about harking back to a time when there was more true togetherness, and more proper snow.

But out beyond Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and Bing there’s a vast treasure of Christmas music that doesn’t sound nostalgic at all. Go back to the earliest Christmas songs, and you find a lusty heartiness that lives in the moment.

The feast of Christmas was overlaid on pagan festivals celebrating the winter solstice, and in things such as the Wassail Song and the Boar’s Head Carols you can feel a pagan energy.

The Holly and the Ivy seems decorous enough now, but in the 14th century it was a danced and sung word game full of bawdy double entendres, the prickly holly was man, the twining ivy was woman. Two centuries later Henry VIII added to this repertoire with his carol Green Grow’th the Holly.

By this time there was already a millennium and a half of Christmas music in the Church, but it had no particular Christmas flavour. Come forward in time, though, and one simple “Christmassy” quality reveals itself: splendour.

This is the most joyous festival in the calendar, so it was only right that the clergy should put on their best vestments, the church should be full of candles and flowers, and the musicians should put on the best possible show.

“Splendour” at first meant towering vocal polyphony. One of the first surviving polyphonic pieces, Pérotin’s Viderunt omnes, has a Christmas text. But as you move forward into the Renaissance and Baroque, splendour means colour and contrast and drama. And that means telling the Christmas story in music, which gives lots of scope for human and picturesque touches.

In Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas Story, composed around 1660, the angel’s words are haloed in strings, the shepherds are signalled by “rustic” recorders and bassoons, the wise men have solemn trombones, and Herod is accompanied by trumpets. This is the beginning of a line of big festive pieces that leads to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Handel’s Messiah, which wasn’t written to celebrate Christmas, but was bound to be co-opted into the season’s music, given its subject matter.

So far, so predictable. But what about those Baroque instrumental pieces such as Corelli’s Christmas Concerto? What have they got to do with Christmas?

A clue is given by an old Italian custom you can still see in Rome between Christmas and New Year. Musicians in rustic dress come into the main squares to play plangent melodies on the piffero and zampogna, shawm and bagpipe.

They’re students at the Accademia, mostly, and you can see the trainers peeping out under their “shepherds’ “ smocks. It’s a touching sound, though, and a reminder of a link between Christmas and the pastoral. In painting, it’s the three wise men with their gorgeous robes who get pride of place in nativity scenes. But it’s the shepherds who call the tune in Christmas music. Baroque composers left us hundreds of gently lilting Christmas pastorals, the most famous ones being Corelli’s and the one in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

Once the middle class takes centre stage in history, Christmas music becomes well behaved. The pastoral tone and the tipsiness disappear, apart from odd moments such as Tchaikovsky’s Second Quartet, where there’s an amusing portrayal of the Russian custom of drunken Christmas visits in costume.

Instead, we get cosily domestic Christmas music, written for instruments such as the piano and harmonium. But this isn’t yet nostalgia; the emotion is still real, and strong. If you doubt that, listen to Arnold Schoenberg’s Weihnachtsmusik.

You won’t believe that that fearsome inventor of “modern music” could have written something so exquisite and touching.

Download Your Favourite Christmas Carols Music and Songsheets

The carols are: Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Silent Night, In the Bleak Midwinter, O Come, all ye Faithful, O Little Town of Bethlehem, Once in Royal David’s City, God Rest ye Merry, Gentlemen, It Came upon the Midnight Clear, Coventry Carol and Away in a Manger. To download the carol backing music, right-click on the button next to ‘download,’ choose ‘Save target as …’ and save the sound file to your computer.

It’s Christmastime. Time to release a holiday album, that is. This season’s list includes such easy-listening choices as James Taylor at Christmas and Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong, the big hit of the bunch, as well as convivial outings from out-of-the-blue sources such as hair-metal band Twisted Sister, Parliament funkateer Bootsy Collins, and rapper Jim Jones.

The song list that follows fills up one CD with recommended revelries. All songs are either brand-new or chestnuts available on 2006 reissues. Everything’s available on iTunes, except where noted.

1.”The Winter Solstice,” Sufjan Stevens. Evocative instrumental from the wunderkind behind the 50 States project comes from Songs for Christmas (Asthmatic Kitty), a budget-priced, five-CD, 35-song box that’s this year’s stocking-stuffer standout.

2.”White Christmas,” Bing Crosby. Der Bingle, arranged by Nelson Riddle, off Christmas Classics (Capitol).

3. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” Dean Martin. One suspects that a hot toddy also helped the effortless crooner heat up. From Christmas With the Rat Pack (Capitol).

4. “A Great Big Sled,” The Killers. Over-the-top Las Vegans climb aboard with Santa for this iTunes single. Proceeds go to Bono’s RED campaign to fight disease in Africa.

5. “Winter Wonderland,” Aretha Franklin. Vintage ‘Retha, available on the inevitable Rachael Ray’s How Cool Is That Christmas (Sony).

6. “Up on the Housetop,” Jackson 5. Preadolescent Michael leads his brothers in pleading their case with Saint Nick. On the hit-or-miss Now That’s What I Call Christmas, Vol. 3 (Strategic Marketing).

7. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” James Taylor. Sweet Baby James does justice to the bittersweet classic, from James Taylor at Christmas (Columbia).

8. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” Ellis Marsalis. Crescent City jazz patriarch tickles the ivories on this jaunty instrumental. From New Orleans Christmas (Putomayo).

9. “Santa’s Second Line,” New Birth Brass Band. Kris Kringle gets Big Easy funeral party treatment. Also from New Orleans Christmas.

10. “Wish List,” Jim Jones. Harlem rapper brings the real, wonders if it’s “the proper way to spend the holidays / Locked down upstate a hundred miles away?” From A Dipset Christmas (Koch).

11.”Merry Christmas Baby,” Bootsy Collins. The P-Funk bass man has a funkalicious way with Charles Brown’s classic. “I haven’t had a drink this morning / But I’m all lit up like a Christmas tree.” From the delectable Christmas Is 4 Ever (Shout Factory).

12. “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” Twisted Sister. Dee Snider brings heavy metal thunder on A Twisted Christmas (Razor & Tie). Amusing in small doses.

13. “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” Wynonna Judd. Country belter plays it straight on the solid A Classic Christmas (Curb).

14. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” Rhonda Vincent. Brenda Lee goes bluegrass. From Beautiful Star: A Christmas Collection (Rounder).

15. “Jingle Bells,” Brad Paisley. Underrated axman cuts loose on honky-tonk instrumental, from the top-notch Brad Paisley’s Christmas (Arista).

16. “Christmas All Over the World,” Sammy Davis Jr. Holiday kitsch, with a multilingual children’s chorus. From Christmas With the Rat Pack.

17. “(It’s Good to Be) A Jew at Christmas,” Good for the Jews. “It’s clear we’re the chosen ones / We get eight nights, you only get one.” Humorous duo play the Tin Angel tonight. www.myspace.com/goodforthejews.

18. “Christmas Morning,” Loudon Wainwright III. Rufus’ dad takes a contemplative look around at a world where “there is sand, there are camels, but where are the wise men?” From Midwinter, an estimable four-CD set on the British Free Reed label.

19. “Cool Yule,” Bette Midler. The Divine Miss M sashays through Steve Allen-penned big-band title cut of her seasonal CD (Columbia).

20. “River,” Sarah McLachlan. Sorrowful thrush expresses disconsolate solidarity with fellow Canuck composer Joni Mitchell. On Wintersong (Arista).

21. “Christmas Light,” the dBs. Indie-rock heroes return with an expanded version of the 1986 holiday gem, Christmas Time Again (Collector’s Choice).

22. “Christmastime,” Aimee Mann. Adult alternative heroine sings hubby Michael Penn’s song, from the predictably melancholy and pleasurable One More Drifter in the Snow (Superego).

23. “Get Behind Me, Santa!” Sufjan Stevens. A horn-happy, hand-clapping play on the satanic title of the last White Stripes album spreads good cheer.

24. “I Believe,” Frank Sinatra. The Chairman keeps the faith, swings hard. From Christmas With the Rat Pack.

25. “My Dear Acquaintance (A Happy New Year),” Peggy Lee. No Auld Land Syne, please. Fond wishes for a healthy and happy 2007, from Christmas With Peggy Lee (Capitol).

Cliff has made it to number one twice before at Christmas as a solo artist

Sir Cliff Richard has launched his traditional bid for the Christmas Number One slot.

He’s released 21st Century Christmas and if he does beat Take That and the X Factor winner to the top of the charts, he’ll have had a Number One in every one of the past six decades.

He’s made it twice before as a solo artist and once with The Shadows.

He didn’t release a Christmas single last but this time he’s come up with a ditty that mentions mobile phones, text messages and DVDs.