Just sing the bells and jingle the lyrics

They are the soundtrack to the festive period, sung every year by children and choirs – but you might be surprised to hear how and why our favourite Christmas carols were written , writes SHANE HEGARTY

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

It could have been Rollo the Red-Nosed Reindeer or, worse, Reginald. Instead, Robert L May went with Rudolph while writing his Christmas version of The Ugly Ducklingin 1939. At first it wasn't a song but a verse May wrote for a seasonal book that the Montgomery Ward chain of department stores gave away each year. It asked him for a story with an animal in it, and he went off and created one of the most-loved characters in popular culture. Montgomery Ward turned it down at first, worried that the red nose had alcoholic connotations.

May kept working on it, though, finishing a month after the death of his wife. (It’s often said, apparently wrongly, that he wrote it to help his four-year-old daughter through her mother’s cancer.) It proved a huge success, and six million copies of the story had been distributed by 1946.

It was only in 1947 that May was given the copyright, making him very rich. A cartoon followed, but it wasn’t until 1949 that the song was written that cemented Rudolph’s place in Christmas culture.

The tune was written by May's brother-in-law Johnny Marks – one of the great songwriters of his time. He wrote several popular Christmas songs, including the splendid Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, which was a hit for Brenda Lee and later proved a winning addition to classic film Home Alone.

Marks turned Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeerinto a hit song, but only after adapting it. He shortened it substantially and gave a twist to lines such as "While every so often they'd stop to call names / At one little deer not allowed in their games".

Other sections needed to be written out, although it would have been interesting to hear him come up with a catchy tune to such a line as: “I hope you’ll continue to keep us from grief / On future dark trips, as commander-in-chief!” It took a bit of work before any well-known singer would take it on.

Eventually, in 1949, Gene Autry – aka the Singing Cowboy, owner of Champion, the Wonder Horse –

recorded it. It was the Christmas number one, selling 2.5 million copies in its first year and going on to become the second-biggest-selling song of all time (behind White Christmas) until the 1980s.

It has since been sung by Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, the Jackson Five, Ringo Starr and every child in the English-speaking world.

Jingle Bells

Jingle Bellsisn't a Christmas song. We know it as a Christmas song. We can't imagine Christmas without it. But it wasn't written for Christmas.

The lyrics may look clear-cut – bells, sleigh, laughing all the way – but look again at them. There’s not a mention of Christmas. There’s no Santa. A single horse instead of a team of reindeer. The sleigh is there, but a sleigh, after all, isn’t just for Christmas.

It was written in winter, however, by James Pierpont, the son of a New England preacher who in 1840 was motivated to write a song not about Christmas but about teenage dating rituals and mastery of the horse. We use only the first verse and chorus, but the rest of the song goes into some detail on this matter:

A day or two ago, I thought I’d take a ride

And soon Miss Fanny Bright was seated by my side;

The horse was lean and lank, misfortune seemed his lot;

He got into a drifted bank and we got upsot

(Chorus)

A day or two ago, the story I must tell

I went out on the snow, and on my back I fell;

A gent was riding by, in a one-horse open sleigh

He laughed as there I sprawling lie but quickly drove away

(Chorus)

Now the ground is white, go it while you’re young

Take the girls tonight, and sing this sleighing song;

Just get a bob-tailed bay, two-forty as his speed

Hitch him to an open sleigh and crack!

You’ll take the lead.

Pierpont had not only found a way of mangling "upset" to rhyme with "lot" but also written an enduring classic – although it was originally called One-Horse Open Sleigh. Its popularity spread out of New England until it was sung around the world. It's still not about Christmas, though.

We Wish You a Merry Christmas

Among his many moments of, ahem, controversy is the charge that Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas. It didn’t quite happen like that, although, during his term as “lord protector” of mid-17th-century England, Christmas was indeed restricted. Parliament enacted a series of laws to clamp down on the exuberance that greeted the period – and continued through the 12 days of Christmas. During this time, January 1st also evolved as the date when people greeted the new year. (Until 1751, the official date was March 25th.)

Among the Protestant establishment there was a suspicion of Christmas as a threat to core Christian practice, and among the more puritanical there was also a displeasure at the waste, drinking, gambling and general leisure that accompanied the religious traditions. So it came to be that Sundays were denoted the only holy days, penalties were introduced for anyone holding special religious ceremonies on other days, and shops and other businesses were to remain open on December 25th.

The legislation lasted between 1642 and the Restoration, in 1660, during which time Christmas remained a popular feast across the land. And among the most popular carols was We Wish You a Merry Christmas, an English West Country carol originally written as a cheeky demand for treats from rich folk. It's why the original words start with the cheery refrain "We wish you a merry Christmas" and then turn somewhat pushy. "Now! Bring us some figgy pudding / and bring some out here / For we all like figgy pudding / so bring some out here." The "cup of good cheer" and the "you and your kin" to whom good tidings were wished were added later.

White Christmas

We all know the opening verse of White Christmas. So sing along.

The sun is shining, the grass is green,

The orange and palm trees sway.

There’s never been such a day in Beverly Hills, LA.

But it’s December the 24th

And I am longing to be up north.

Yes, it’s Irving Berlin’s biggest-selling song of all time, and it begins not with a dream of a white Christmas but with palm trees and sun and Los Angeles. Berlin was in California when he wrote it, and its nostalgic tone, so perfectly interpreted by Bing Crosby, appealed during the second World War.

It seems likely, though, that Berlin wrote the song in 1937 for a Christmas revue that never happened. Instead, it ended up in the movie Winter Holiday, starring Crosby and Fred Astaire. The film White Christmas, with Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen and Danny Kaye, wasn't made until 1954.

Berlin would later brag that the song became a “publishing business in itself”, and the 125 million sales and countless versions attest to that. It’s often noted that there is some irony in the greatest Christmas song of all having been written by a Russian Jew.

For Berlin, December 25th had a tragic association: he lost his three-week-old son Irving jnr on that day in 1928.

But the song’s popularity knows few bounds, partly because it’s a secular carol.

There is, in fact, a rollicking Yiddish version of the song, which the actor Mandy Patinkin performs on his 1998 album Mamaloshen. It's far better than you might imagine.

Bonus fact: the playing of White Christmason radio was the secret message for US forces to leave Saigon in 1975.