Christmas Carols Words Booklet

Morland, the village in Cumbria where I grew up, recently formed a Community Choir, and every Christmas they have a carolling session at the local pub, the Crown Inn. Most of the carols they sing come from the venerable “Carols For Choirs, Book 1“, generally known as the Green Book (other books in the series are orange, blue, and the lesser-known red). There aren’t enough of those to go round, and many participants in the sing-song don’t read music, so in order that everyone might be able to see the words, they used to use some old carol sheets.

However, this were problematic because the sheets didn’t contain all the carols that they wanted to sing and, when they did, the words were sometimes different to those in the Green Book, leading to confusion.

Hence, I have created and typeset “Carols at the Crown“, a 28-page booklet of the words to some of our language’s most famous and God-honouring carols, together with brief explanations and context for each one, and a paragraph on the importance of Christmas on the back. For those carols with multiple translations, adaptions or updatings, the version of words chosen follows the Green Book for those which are in there. Feel free to use and adapt it for your church, community choir or other group.

To the extent that I have a copyright interest in it, this booklet is available under Creative Commons CC-0, which means you can do what you like with it without needing to do anything in return, including crediting me. Note that some of the words in the book are still under copyright, and so you will need to make whatever arrangements are necessary (e.g. for churches, putting your CCLI number on the back page) to make sure that’s OK.

If you are printing it, you may find my booklet printing page order calculator useful. :-)

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