Go Caroling Day

What the day is

Go Caroling Day is observed on December 20. Singing at other people's doors is older than the songs now used for it, and it was originally far less polite.

Origin and background

A carol was not originally a Christmas song at all. The word described a ring dance accompanied by singing, and carols were sung across the year for many occasions before the form attached itself to one season.

The door-to-door custom descends from wassailing, from an Old English greeting meaning be in good health. Groups went between houses with a bowl, sang, and expected food and drink in return, and the exchange was explicit rather than implied. The most familiar carol still preserves the bargain intact: it asks for figgy pudding and then states plainly that the singers will not leave until some is produced. Sung today by children it reads as charming; sung by adults at the door of a wealthier household in a hard winter it meant what it said.

A parallel tradition survives in the cider-making counties of England, where wassailing means singing to the apple trees in January to secure the next harvest.

The custom nearly died. Puritan authorities suppressed Christmas celebration in England in the 1640s and in parts of New England later that century, and the songs survived mainly in oral circulation. Much of what is now standard repertoire was rescued by nineteenth-century collectors who printed carols that had never been written down, and the Victorian revival, helped enormously by Dickens, rebuilt the whole practice into the sentimental form we inherited.

How to take part

• Go in a group and keep it short. Three songs is plenty at any one door.
• Pick songs people can join in with rather than ones that show off a range.
• Go somewhere it will land: a care home or a hospital ward, arranged in advance.
• Collect for a charity while you do it, which is closer to the original exchange than it sounds.
• Look up what your favorite carol is actually asking for. Several are blunter than expected.