Christmas Carols are songs and hymns with lyrics on the theme of Christmas – a celebration of and deep appreciation for the birth of Jesus Christ. They are played and sung during the entire holiday season and a big part of western cultural identity. One definition of a carol is “an old round dance with singing”, and this tradition goes back thousands of years in Europe, where pagan songs were sung at Winter Solstice celebrations as people danced around stone circles. Later on, early Christians created and sung Latin hymns for Christmas services, and eventually they were written in English to make it more accessible to everyone. Many Carols were composed to be a part of the storytelling in nativity plays, which center around the scene of Jesus’ birth. Another interesting note about Christmas Carols is that the lyrics and the music are many times written by different people, and also at different times, sometimes hundreds of years apart.