Christmas carol lyrics and what they mean
Most people can sing three verses of half a dozen carols without having any idea what the words mean. The texts are old, several are translations, and a few of the most-sung lines mean close to the opposite of what they sound like. This guide goes through the phrases that puzzle people most.
“God rest ye merry, gentlemen”
The comma is in the wrong place in almost every printed carol sheet, and moving it changes the sentence entirely. It is not addressed to merry gentlemen. Rest here means keep or make, and merry means strong or mighty rather than cheerful, so the line asks God to keep you strong, gentlemen.
The same sense of merry survives in “merry England” and in the archaic phrase “make merry”. It is the older meaning, and it is why the next line runs “let nothing you dismay” — the whole opening is a blessing against fear, not a greeting to a group of jolly men.
Printed correctly it should read: God rest ye merry, gentlemen. If your order of service has it as God rest ye, merry gentlemen, it is worth fixing before it goes to print.
“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”
Charles Wesley wrote “Hark, how all the welkin rings” in 1739. Welkin is an Old English word for the vault of the sky, so the original line has the whole heavens ringing. George Whitefield changed it to the version we sing, which is more singable and less interesting.
“Veiled in flesh the Godhead see” is the line that stops people. It is a compressed statement of the incarnation: divinity concealed inside a body. “Hail th’incarnate Deity” two lines later says the same thing again more plainly.
The tune has nothing to do with Christmas either. Mendelssohn wrote it in 1840 for a cantata celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of printing, and said he thought it would never suit sacred words. It was fitted to Wesley’s text after his death.
“O Come, All Ye Faithful”
The Latin original, Adeste Fideles, is usually credited to John Francis Wade in the 1740s, though the authorship has been argued over for two centuries. The English translation most churches sing is Frederick Oakeley’s, from 1841.
“Very God, begotten not created” is not a claim that God is emphatic. Very here means true or actual, from the Latin verus, and the whole phrase is lifted from the Nicene Creed. It is a fourth-century doctrinal formula sitting in the middle of a Christmas carol.
“Lo, He abhors not the Virgin’s womb” is the line that most often gets quietly dropped from corporate carol sheets. It means he does not shrink from being born as a human being.
“In the Bleak Midwinter”
Christina Rossetti wrote the poem around 1872 for an American magazine, and it was not intended as a carol at all. “Snow had fallen, snow on snow” is doing something specific: the repetition slows the line to the pace of the weather it describes.
“Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain” sets up the contrast the whole poem turns on — the immensity of the subject against a stable. The last verse, “What can I give Him, poor as I am?”, is the reason the poem endures; it is the only carol in common use that ends on a question about the singer rather than a statement about the child.
The midwinter itself is invention. Nobody knows the season, and a Judean December looks nothing like the frosty wind Rossetti describes. She was writing about an English winter and knew it.
“Once in Royal David’s City”
Cecil Frances Alexander wrote the words in 1848 as part of a collection explaining the Apostles’ Creed to children, which is why the verses are so plainly constructed. Royal David’s city is Bethlehem, David’s birthplace.
“He came down to earth from heaven, who is God and Lord of all” is the creed line the verse was built to teach. The middle verses about the child being “mild, obedient, good as He” are Victorian schoolroom morality and are often cut now, which is a defensible edit.
The tradition of a solo treble singing the first verse unaccompanied at King’s College began in 1919, a year after the service itself. The chorister is not told in advance who will sing, which is a piece of theatre and also a kindness.
“The Twelve Days of Christmas”
The twelve days run from Christmas Day to Epiphany on 6 January, not up to Christmas. The song is a cumulative memory game of French origin, first printed in English in 1780.
You will often be told each gift is a coded catechism for persecuted Catholics. There is no evidence for it; the claim first appears in the 1990s and has been thoroughly picked apart since. It is a good story and it is not true, which is worth knowing before repeating it in an introduction from the lectern.
The four calling birds were originally “colly birds” — colly meaning coal-black, so blackbirds. The five gold rings may be ring-necked pheasants, which would make the first seven gifts all birds.
“Ding Dong! Merrily on High”
The tune is a sixteenth-century French dance, printed in 1589 in a manual on how to dance. The words are much later: George Ratcliffe Woodward wrote them in 1924, deliberately archaic.
“Gloria, Hosanna in excelsis” is the extended refrain everyone recognises, and it means “Glory, save us, in the highest”. Hosanna began as a plea and became an exclamation of praise, which is the reverse of what most people assume.
Woodward’s verses are full of invented archaism — “e’en so here below, below” — and were mock-antique when he wrote them. He was writing pastiche, and knew his audience would enjoy it.
“Good King Wenceslas”
Wenceslas was a real tenth-century Duke of Bohemia, murdered by his brother and declared a king posthumously. The Feast of Stephen is 26 December, so this is a Boxing Day carol rather than a Christmas one.
The story of the page following in his master’s footsteps to keep warm is the point of the whole thing, and the last two lines state the moral outright: “ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing”.
The tune is a thirteenth-century spring carol, Tempus adest floridum, about flowers appearing in the meadows. J. M. Neale attached his winter text to it in 1853, which some Victorian critics thought was vandalism.
“Silent Night”
Written in Austria in 1818, words by Joseph Mohr and tune by Franz Gruber, and first performed with a guitar because the church organ was out of action. The English translation is John Freeman Young’s, from 1859.
“Round yon Virgin Mother and Child” confuses people because it looks like a spelling mistake. Yon means over there, and the line means “around that mother and child”. The German original is plainer still.
It is the most translated carol there is, sung in over three hundred languages, and UNESCO lists it as intangible cultural heritage.
Getting the words right on the night
Print every verse you intend to sing, at a size an older congregation can read. People sing the first verse from memory and go quiet in the second, and the usual cause is not shyness but a service sheet set in ten point.
Decide in advance which verses you are cutting. Most carols have verses that are routinely dropped, and a congregation half of whom are singing verse four while the choir has moved to verse five is a mess that takes two lines to recover from.
If someone is introducing the carols from the lectern, give them something true to say. A short, accurate note about where a text came from lands better than the twelve-days catechism story, and does not require anyone in the room to correct it afterwards.
Frequently asked questions
What does “God rest ye merry, gentlemen” mean?
It asks God to keep you strong. Rest means keep or make, and merry means mighty rather than cheerful, so it is a blessing rather than a greeting. The comma belongs after merry, not before it, which most printed carol sheets get wrong.
What does “veiled in flesh the Godhead see” mean?
It is a compressed statement of the incarnation: divinity concealed inside a human body. The line comes from Charles Wesley's Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, and the next line, hail th'incarnate Deity, restates it more plainly.
When are the twelve days of Christmas?
From Christmas Day to Epiphany on 6 January, not the twelve days leading up to Christmas. The claim that each gift is a coded Catholic catechism has no evidence behind it and first appears in the 1990s.
Why is Good King Wenceslas sung at Christmas?
It is set on the Feast of Stephen, 26 December, so it is a Boxing Day carol. Wenceslas was a real tenth-century Duke of Bohemia, and the tune is a thirteenth-century spring carol about flowers, repurposed by J. M. Neale in 1853.
We sing carol services in churches, offices and livery halls across the UK, and Luca is happy to supply short, accurate notes on the texts for your order of service or for whoever is introducing them.
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