Christmas carols have long been an interest of mine even before I went to University. It started with a couple of trips to the Sheffield region to visit some of the carol sings in that area in the run up to Christmas. The carols they sing are not from the common repertoire but are distinctive to the area. This got me interested in the idea that there might be local carols from Wiltshire (where I live) and the surrounding counties. I and my husband Chris joined forces with other people who had been having similar thoughts. The result was the Bradford on Avon carol sings.
These have their own website where you can learn all about them. Suffice to say here we sing in three pubs every year. There are many singers and a band of a dozen or more musicians singing carols from Wiltshire, Somerset and elsewhere. I have several roles in this: researching new carols, leading the carols band and leading a series of learning sessions each November teaching the carols to interested people ready for the big sings in December.
From these experiences I have developed a talk with audio and visual examples that describes and illustrates the surprising and interesting history of the English Christmas carol which I have presented on a couple of occasions, most notably to the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution in 2021. If you feel this might be interesting to your group then please contact me.