As it is Sunday I’m going my usual route for Advent and sharing with you some versions of Christmas Carols. This is, as I’m sure you are aware, the final Sunday in Advent this year, so I’ve decided to give you a bumper edition. There will be five in all, two of which are regulars for me, alongside three new ones.

Let’s get straight into it with one of those regular favourites. It is a sweet animation to go with a song from one of my favourite singers:

That is such a lovely version of While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks, which is particular to the part of Yorkshire where Kate Rusby is from. It is the title track of her first album of Christmas songs, which I bought in 2008 when it was first released, and have played so many times since then. The animation isn’t an ‘official’ one, but it is a really good fit for the song, and the depiction of Kate is perfect. As folk music isn’t a particularly big seller here the album did well to reach #91, I think.

Last Sunday I gave you my favourite version of this beautiful carol, by Sinead O’Connor. This one, from two years ago, runs it a close second:

I think that is lovely. Information about The Hound And The Fox is a little hard to come by – even their own Facebook page doesn’t reveal their names! What I have found is that they are McKenzie and Reilly Zamber, a husband and wife duo from Grants Pass, Oregon. They have been making records together for around seven years, and also produce their own videos: they make videos for others, too, including for the likes of Pentatonix. They sell their CDs direct, and are also available on Apple Music/iTunes and Spotify. This is from their album Songs Of Winter, and I think they deserve to be more widely heard: their 257k YouTube subscribers and 90k Facebook followers would probably agree!

This next one is another that I haven’t played before, and I think it is the first time here for the band, too:

Rather like the first of today’s selections, this is one of those carols that we used to delight in as kids as we could play about with the words. We Three Kings went by the original title of Three Kings of Orient, and is also known as We Three Kings of Orient Are or The Quest of the Magi. It was written by John Henry Hopkins Jr. in 1857. At the time of composing the carol, Hopkins served as the rector of Christ Episcopal Churchin Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and he wrote the carol for a Christmas pageant in New York City. It was the first widely popular Christmas carol written in America. The Wikipedia entry for this carol includes the line “Since the 1970s, the carol has been frequently parodied by children.” I can assure them that it started much earlier than that – around 1960 in my case! The Mediaeval Baebes, who perform this version, were formed in 1996, and have had a widely changing membership since then, varying from six to twelve in number. They have mostly been considered a classical music act, but have had much radio and tv coverage here. This song was on their Of Kings And Angels album, a collection of Christmas songs and carols released in 2013. They have been steady sellers of records through their lifespan, and are estimated to have had sales of around 1m or more – they are best seen as a live act, though, as I can confirm.

I haven’t played this one since 2017, before the days of daily Advent posts, but it is a lovely version of one of the most beautiful carols:

There is Enya‘s usual ethereal quality about that, which I think really fits the carol well. I also like the version by The Civil Wars but on balance I decided to go for this one. I had hoped to find a live performance, but this lyric version was as good as it got – it takes nothing away from the beauty of the music, though, and the images help to enhance the atmosphere. This was a track on Enya’s album And Winter Came which was released in November 2008, reaching #6 in the UK and #8 in the US. The carol was originally written in Latin, and dates back as far as the monastic days of the 8th and 9th centuries. The most commonly used version in the English-speaking world, i.e. this one, dates back to an 1851 translation by John Mason Neale. A brief history lesson for you there!

My final selection for today was also written in Latin, and it has stayed that way. I shared a performance of this one last year, but this video, featuring a live performance by the band line-up that recorded it, was posted to YouTube last month, and that seemed like the ideal opportunity for me:

Gaudete (which means ‘rejoice’) is a sacred Christmas carol, thought to have been composed in the 16th century. It was published in Piae Cantiones, a collection of Finnish/Swedish sacred songs published in 1582. No music is given for the verses, but the standard tune comes from older liturgical books. Steeleye Span recorded their version in 1972 for their album Below The Salt (UK #43), and this was released as a single, becoming a #14 Christmas hit that year. I’ve seen the band perform this on a number of occasions, going right back to the early days, and it is always a show-stopping moment. Maddy Prior is quite exceptional in the way she sings this, and you can always hear a pin drop as the audience holds its collective breath.

That’s all for my final set of carols for this year, though don’t bet against me dropping in another later in the week, if the mood takes me – there are just so many out there! As always, I’m leaving you with my image of the day:

I’ll be back again tomorrow, of course 👼