Christmas Carols & Festive Luncheon

Middlethorpe Hall & Spa is hosting a Christmas Carols & Festive Luncheon on Wednesday 9 December, and it's exactly what it sounds like: a choir quartet singing traditional carols followed by a festive three-course lunch with wine. It's one of those mid-week things that works well if you're looking to get your Christmas sorted a bit early, before the December rush really kicks in.

The carols are the first half of the afternoon. A choir quartet will be singing through the traditional repertoire, the kind of songs that have become part of the season. If you've ever wondered where they come from, the history is longer than most of us realise. Christmas carols are songs or hymns on the theme of Christmas, traditionally sung during the holiday season, and the term 'noel' is sometimes used, especially for those of French origin. The earliest known Christmas hymns go back to 4th-century Rome, with Latin hymns like Ambrose's Veni redemptor gentium. By the 12th century, the Parisian monk Adam of Saint Victor began incorporating melodic elements from popular songs, creating forms closer to the traditional carol. The earliest English carols appear in a 1426 manuscript by the Shropshire chaplain John Awdlay, and many were printed in Piae Cantiones, a collection of late-medieval Latin songs first published in 1582.

Victorian Britain saw a bit of a revival, too. The 1871 publication of Christmas Carols, New and Old by Henry Ramsden Bramley and Sir John Stainer helped bring them back, and the 1928 Oxford Book of Carols, edited by Martin Shaw, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Dearmer, is still in print. Even Silent Night has a specific start: it comes from Austria, first performed in the Nikolauskirche in Oberndorf on 24 December 1818. That's the kind of material the quartet will be drawing from.

Once the singing is over, the afternoon moves on to the festive three-course luncheon, served with wine. It's a full meal to follow the music, so it's as much about the lunch as it is about the carols. The whole thing takes place at Middlethorpe Hall & Spa in York on Wednesday 9 December.