Choirboys sing carols in Westminster Cathedral. Photograph: Martin Argles/Guardian
I'd just finished a gruesome winter term at university, the radiator in my room hadn't worked for months and my bank account resembled the temperature outside: rock-bottom. Traumatised by what felt like three months of piped Christmas muzak, I decided to buy myself an early present. It came in the form of a rather weird CD focusing on Bach and his contemporaries: a recreation of an Epiphany Mass as it might have been celebrated at JSB's church at Leipzig just after Christmas 1740.
I loved it. The reason wasn't actually Bach's music, or even the painstaking way it had been produced - McCreesh and his engineers at Deutsche Grammophon tried to reproduce every audible element of the occasion, from church bells to a (mercifully trimmed) Lutheran sermon to the shuffle of parishioners' feet along stone aisles. What stunned me was a sound I'm not sure I'd heard before: the sound of a German congregation doing carols, and together making a mightier noise than it's really possible to describe. Even for a feckless non-believer such as me, it was a revelation. This was singing.
I thought of this moment a few days ago when flicking through a new book by Rupert Christiansen, the Telegraph's opera critic. It's called, perhaps rather feyly, Once More With Feeling: A Book of Classic Hymns and Carols, and it begins with a startling call to arms.
"Even in an age as benighted as ours, its spiritual life flattened by prim multiculturalism, yar-boo-sucks atheism and mindless materialism," Christiansen thunders, "the great hymns and carols of the Protestant tradition retain their unique capacity to bring us together." Let's ignore the cheap crack at multiculturalism (and not all atheists are Dawkins-style fundamentalists, thank you very much): is Christiansen actually right? Can carols still form a kind of warm yuletide glue binding us all together? Do we even want them to?
I wonder. Since I gave up singing regularly, I've had the experience of taking part in Christmas services not as a paid-up (semi-)professional, but as a member of, well, the audience. It seems unfair to call the people who aren't in the choir anything else, for the simple reason that in the classic Church of England tradition you don't actually get to do very much singing if you're not stood at the front. The much-vaunted Nine Lessons and Carols service broadcast worldwide from King's College, Cambridge is actually an example of how grimly uninclusive such Christmas jollities can be. If you're not in the choir you're lucky if you're allowed to bash your way through more than a few numbers, the people in robes and surplices nabbing many of the best tunes while you fiddle with your hymn-sheet. It's little wonder that so many of us feel anxious about opening our larynxes and genuinely letting go. If even in church we're all but discouraged from doing so, we shouldn't be surprised if dismal gurglings and embarrassed squawks are the result.
This seems a shame, not least because, as Christiansen's book reveals, so many ancient carol tunes have their origins not in church at all, but in the wider culture. The lovely, lyrical tune to The First Noel is actually a Cornish folk melody. God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen probably first found life in the pubs of 16th-century London. The Holly and the Ivy, stuffed so full of fertility symbols it's a wonder it doesn't impregnate anyone who sings it, is a mixture of esoteric theology and words from various sources jumbled enthusiastically together.
That's as it should be. Carols give voice to forgotten folk-tunes and ancient ideas, celebrating the communal via rituals whose precise origins have long since passed from consciousness. That's the point of carols for me: not robes, not organs, not even what Christiansen calls the "part of Christianity that passeth understanding, the sheer mystery of it". It's the sense that we're in this together, whatever our precise beliefs. And maybe if we did a bit more of it, forgot worrying about the God stuff and sang like we were having fun, we'd give even the people of Freiberg a run for their money.
