We Wish You A Merry Christmas: A Song History
Its age is unknown. It is said to have come from the West of England in the sixteenth century, but it is absent from the oldest carol collections, and almost nothing else about its early history has been found.[1] It is classed as a “luck song,” the kind of good-wishing song tied to wassailing and to carolers who sang at people’s doors.[1] Folk-song collectors found it in more than one regional form, filed in the Roud Folk Song Index under numbers 230 and 9681. Anne Gilchrist noted two verses from children singing at her family’s door in Southport at Christmas 1904, and Cecil Sharp heard it from two singers in Shropshire in 1911.[2]
Adriaen van Ostade, Singers at the Window, etching (detail). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Seventeenth-century Dutch singers, not English carolers.
A well-known choral arrangement was made by Arthur Warrell.[2] Oxford University Press published it in 1935, describing the song as traditional and probably from the English West Country, and the University of Bristol Madrigal Singers, conducted by Warrell, first performed it on December 6, 1935.[3] The “figgy pudding” of the familiar verses has a local explanation: in Cornish and Devon dialect “fig” meant raisin, so a figgy pudding was originally a plum pudding by another name.[4]
A different carol with the same opening greeting belongs to the village carol tradition of South Yorkshire. The booklet of a 1973 recording made at Dungworth called it “quite distinct from the ‘figgy pudding’” version.[2] Revival singers have recorded both carols, and one group has credited Warrell’s arrangement as a loose model for its harmonies.[2]
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