The carols
Eight carols in the public domain, played by a music box made in the browser. There are no recordings: every note is synthesized while you listen.
How to listen
Press M or the Music button, and the carols play one after another. The mixer under Music sets the music against the crackle. On the detailed page, tap the 1930s radio on the mantel and it tunes in; tap it again and it clicks off. Pip hops over it when he fetches a log.
Silent Night · Franz Gruber, 1818
Joseph Mohr wrote the words in 1816. Franz Gruber set them for guitar, and the two of them first sang it at midnight Mass in Oberndorf, near Salzburg, on Christmas Eve 1818. The music box plays Gruber's tune.
Jingle Bells · James Lord Pierpont, 1857
Published in 1857 as "One Horse Open Sleigh". It never mentions Christmas. It is a sleigh-ride song that Christmas adopted.
Deck the Halls · Welsh traditional
The tune is "Nos Galan", a Welsh New Year's Eve song, and the fa-la-las are older than the English words. Thomas Oliphant wrote those in 1862.
We Wish You a Merry Christmas · English traditional
A wassailing song from the West of England. Carollers sang it at the door and did not leave until they got the figgy pudding.
Good King Wenceslas · Piae Cantiones, 1582
The tune is a spring carol, "Tempus adest floridum", printed in the Finnish collection Piae Cantiones in 1582. John Mason Neale wrote the story of the Bohemian duke and his page in 1853.
Joy to the World · Lowell Mason, 1839
Isaac Watts wrote the words in 1719, after Psalm 98. Lowell Mason set them in 1839 to a tune he called "Antioch" and credited to phrases of Handel.
The First Noel · English traditional
A Cornish carol, first printed in the 1820s and 1830s. "Noel" is the old French word for Christmas.
Carol of the Bells · Mykola Leontovych, 1916
"Shchedryk" is a Ukrainian New Year song about a swallow that promises a good year. Leontovych's choral setting was first sung in Kyiv in 1916. The English words about bells came in 1936 and are still in copyright, so the music box plays the tune alone, as Leontovych wrote it: the motif, the motif a third higher, the falling line and the rising scales.
Where the notes come from
Each melody was checked note by note against a public score: the Mutopia Project, abcnotation.com and, for Shchedryk, the four-part score in Wikipedia's article. The list, with every correction made, is in tools/carols/SOURCES.md on GitHub.