Think you know your Christmas carols? Think again!

Andrew Gant unpacks the mysterious origins and strange evolutions of some of our favourite – and less well-known – festive words and tunes

When you stop to think about it, some of the words and imagery in our favourite Christmas carols can be pretty odd.

Never mind the ground-dwelling partridge climbing a pear tree, or three ships with two passengers sailing into Bethlehem, which is landlocked. Where does the idea of ‘Tomorrow shall be my dancing day’ come from? What is a dancing day? Why tomorrow?

This ancient and mysterious lyric actually charts a fascinating journey through the entire Christian worldview from creation to last things. When we sing it as a Christmas carol, we tend to just snip out the verses about the nativity. This is very much not how folk carols work at all: they are much richer, more mysterious and more complex than that.