Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas

Heartwarming Stories Behind Popular Carols

De: Ace Collins

Narrado por: Marc Cashman

Enrich your holiday celebrations as you discover the incredible stories and the inspiration behind the Christmas songs you know and love.

Jingle Bells Mary
Did You Know?
The First Noel
O Holy Night
Silver Bells
White Christmas

The songs that you've sung since you were a child continue to bring Christmas to life each year. Now, you'll learn how your favorite Christmas songs came to be. Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas reveals the surprising and fascinating origins of over thirty of your favorite Christmas songs and carols, both secular and religious. Along the way you will uncover spiritual insights, heartwarming stories, and tales of the humble men and women of the past who wrote what remain the most beloved Christmas songs today. Discover how:

• Iconic artists such as Judy Garland and Nat King Cole were influenced and inspired to record instant classics like Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and The Christmas Song.
• God-inspired words given to an unlikely musician became Mary, Did You Know?
• One of the oldest Christmas songs still sung today, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, changed from a hymn sung in Latin only in Catholic masses to a carol embraced by every Christian denomination in the world.

From the rollicking appeal of Jingle Bells to the tranquil beauty of Silent Night, the great songs of Christmas contain messages of peace, hope, and truth. Each song in its own way expresses a facet of God’s heart and celebrates the birth of his greatest gift to the world—Jesus. These stories will warm your heart and bring extra significance to the carols you sing each December.

Beautiful Account of Beloved Christmas Song

So many books and films want to minimize the Christian influence on Christmas traditions. Thankfully, this is not one of them. The author writes a reverent and engaging book looking back to early Christian times through the modern day. The author expands on many of the songs of Christmas past and how they remain alive today. With excellent narration the time literally flies by and before you know it you will be looking for more works by Ace Collins.

Stories behind songs

I absolutely loved this book I have listened twice and will probably listen again. You learn so much about the stories inspiration and who actually wrote it and sang it. Highly recommend

A Fun Contribution to Holiday Lore

This was really fun to listen to (the paper copy is also great and comes with cool illustrations and the lyrics.).

Some cautions about some of the history: 1. Collins suffers a bit from unfounded Progressive conceits (e.g. “the old way was reactive, unfeeling, and dead until a new radical came along and changed things! Old____ is bad and gloomy, new____ is liberating and fun! The hero is always the guy throwing off tradition” etc.) that sometimes gets tiresome; 2. Collins trades in a few ideological frameworks that are not supported by actual evidence (e.g “the dark ages,” etc.) that can distract the historically-minded reader; 3. Some of his interpretations don’t seem accurate (E.g. The Twelve Days of Christmas song as a crypto-catechism appears to be an urban legend.).

All that said, these are easy issues to bracket, and they should not distract from the reality that cultural history is composed by many elements that are not, strictly speaking, historical. In this sense, it contributes to cultural history as lore—remember, the title is “stories…” not “history” proper. And Collins does not disappoint. He is an excellent collector and interpreter of lore. This is not to say that Collins gets everything wrong either—far from—just to put the book in the right perspective and to remind people to not judge it by the same standards as a formal history.

This book is unique and valuable piece of culture, it is also just really fun to listen to. If one can manage their expectations about history, it is endlessly enjoyable as a music/Christmas lover can listen again and again. Highly recommended.