In a poll of 51 choral experts and directors in the world, today’s Carol of Comfort & Joy, “In the Bleak Midwinter” was voted the best Christmas Carol. Can you figure out why? Give it a listen, sung by the Willows Academy choir. Experts looked at lyrics, harmonies, musical composition, and more to decide what […]Read more

Are you traveling to see family or friends for Christmas? How about traveling to a soup kitchen or a shelter to give back this holiday? That’s what Good King Wenceslaus did in the cold, bitter winter weather. Today’s Carol of Comfort & Joy follows King Wenceslaus of Bohemia (modern-day Czech Republic) as he, on the […]Read more

Did you know? Most Christmas carols, as you might have noticed, start out as poems and later are adapted to music. That makes Episcopal clergyman John Henry Hopkins Jr., the writer of “We Three Kings”, groundbreaking – he both wrote and set his carol to music! In 1857, Hopkins was ministering in Pennsylvania when he […]Read more

“O Holy Night” is one of the Christmas carols that you may only know by tune and not by lyric. It was penned in French, originally, and then translated into English by John Sullivan Dwight, a notorious musician and teacher. He was surrounded with friends converting to the Catholic faith, including Isaac Hecker, who later […]Read more

Did you like learning a little Latin yesterday? Here comes some more with today’s Carol of Comfort and Joy. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”, when it was first found written down in Germany in 1710, came from Latin: “Veni, Veni Emmanuel”. Its tune and meter of the song come from a type of song called […]Read more

Today’s Carol of Comfort & Joy has at least five different lyricists who’ve been given credit: John IV, King of Portugal, two composers, a house of Cistercian monks, and even Saint Bonaventure. Think you can guess what Carol it might be? Here’s a hint: the title in Latin is “Adeste fideles”. Do you know it? […]Read more

“Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, lean your ear this way…” Boy, I bet we all wished as kids that Saint Nicholas would just tell us what we were getting for Christmas, didn’t we? Maybe not every present, but a few of those things we really, really hoped we would get. Sometimes the suspense was too much, […]Read more

Today’s Carol of Comfort & Joy is one whose tune you might know from the end of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” As the kids all stand around the scraggly little Christmas tree Charlie Brown has, with its huge red ornament, they start humming a tune that will surely get stuck in your head: it’s the […]Read more

I bet you look forward to singing “Angels we have heard on high” every year at Christmas Mass. It’s a great challenge for the whole family to get all 16 different “o”s in one breath! Kudos to all of you who can do it and still sing “in excelsis Deo” at the end. It’s no […]Read more

Welcome to our first Carol of Comfort & Joy! You may recognize exactly where this series got its name in today’s carol, sung by the Northridge Preparatory School’s choir: God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen. This carol was printed for the first time in 1760 – that’s the version we know today – but it’s been […]Read more