Back to: The Twelve Days of Christmas Carols
This hymn requested by a forgotten parish priest, written by a poet who would later split from the church, given soaring music by a Jewish composer, and which split the French religious establishment. It also stopped the fighting in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 for a day. It was brought to Americans to serve as much as a tool to spotlight the sinful nature of slavery as tell the story of the birth of a Savior. It became the first Christmas hymn broadcast over the radio in 1906.