December 23: "The Holly and the Ivy"

I'm rather excited about the last days of this blog--not meaning that the blog will be ending-- but the songs that I'm going to be covering, as they're my favorite Christmas tunes. It's going to be just like Christmas for me! Except, you know... it'll actually be Christmas. "The Holly and the Ivy" has struck my fancy since I was a kid, thanks largely to my dad's extensive collection of recordings of Christmas brass ensembles, and the fact that I played in a handful in my high school years.

"The Blunder Years"

But "The Holly and the Ivy" really is a uniquely lovely song no matter who you are or how you play it. And as with all the best songs, the jury is still somewhat out on its origins. A cursory Google search may bring you to the conclusion that it's French, but that's probably just plain wrong. "How can you be so sure?" you say? Insightful question, dear reader! It appears in the Roud Folk Song Index as #514. The Roud Folk Song Index, or just "Roud" for short, is a collection of 25,000 folk songs originally written in the English language. The best folklorist research we've got place the song sometime in the late 17th or early 18th century, so not quite as old as I'm used to dealing with on here. Cecil Sharp, the famous English folklorist from the late 19th/early 20th century, included "The Holly and the Ivy" in his 1911 publication English Folk Carols. Later, Sharp would go on to personally record well preserved English ballads that he found in the southern Appalachians. But I digress... Sharp's version of the lyrics is the widely accepted one in the modern era. So what this whole long diatribe is getting at is... no, definitely not French.

Seriously, though, probably one of the winningest military records in the world.

All this fluff is really neither here nor there, because it does nothing to advance your knowledge of the substance of the carol, which is why you're here, isn't it? The content of the song is particularly nice to me, as the use of holly and ivy for the purpose of decorating one's dwelling is an ancient tradition. At the very least it dates back to when it seems most history dates back to, which is the 15th century. Why holly and ivy? I don't have a concrete answer on that, but I'm guessing it has a lot to do with why we celebrate evergreens at this time: they stay green and lush year round. 

So why don't we celebrate the Philly Phanatic?

Anyway, I've always liked the song, and there's no shortage of good recordings of it. So I'll give you one more that I like, from Mannheim Steamroller. I hope it increases the cheer of your semi-pagan-inspired yule.