This Saturday we will be welcoming Oxford Cherwell Brass Band to St Mary’s to play a selection of popular Christmas Carols. With a mixture of carols and readings for shoppers and visitors to Oxford, Carols Galore begins at 12.30pm. This is the prelude to a weekend of Christmas festivity and carol-singing. It will culminate in the traditional Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols with the University Church Choir on Sunday at 6.00pm. We hope that you will be able to join us. You will be very welcome.

One of the things that I discovered as a parish priest in South Yorkshire was that there was a lively tradition of carol-singing in the pubs and working mens clubs within the parish. It’s a tradition which exists in the West country, but it remains particularly strong in the Pennine villages and towns of South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire. Its origins are often associated with the eighteenth century. In the weeks before Christmas, the pubs of Stannington, Dungworth, Ingbirchworth, as well as the Langsett Inn and the Dog and Partridge in my old patch near Midhope, offer a little winter cheer, as everyone in the pub joins in singing carols with a beer or a glass of mulled wine in their hands. The singing is occasionally accompanied by a small band or a wheezing harmonium. It is almost always loud - and rowdy!

There are two aspects of this phenomenon which I find fascinating: first, this tradition is almost entirely independent of the church. As the parish priest, I would turn up and join in - but it was not my task to organise or orchestrate the event. It was something that was animated from the grassroots of the community. The words of the carols morphed from the sacred to the secular and back again, as we sang songs about shepherds and angels, and listened to local ballads, like ‘Pratty Flowers' from the Napoleonic era, lamenting the loss of love. And yet, that combination of the sacred and the secular, the beauty of holiness muddled up with the mundane and the everyday, spoke volumes about the reality of the incarnation. For me, it was one of the things that captured the real joy of Christmas.

Secondly, these songs draw on a folk tradition, which is often local and subject to regional variation. (Indeed, many of our most familiar Christmas Carols emerged as adaptations of folk songs). But one of the effects of establishing a familiar canon of Christmas carols with recognisable tunes is that these local traditions are guarded now more jealously. Woe betide the unsuspecting visitor who thinks that if you live in South Yorkshire, everyone will want to sing ‘While Shepherds Watched’ to ‘Ilkley Moor Baht ‘at’. Just about every village has a different tune to ‘While Shepherds Watched’ - from ‘Sweet Chiming Bells’ to ‘Hail Chime On’ to ‘Langham’. The familiar ‘Winchester Old’, which we will be singing this weekend, still sounds to my ear rather restrained by comparison.

But as we remember these local regional variations and as we prepare for Christmas, it is perhaps good to be reminded that the Eternal Word speaks only in local dialects.

Vicar