The Keyhole
Christmas Eve, 1843, London. A cold, dark, and gloomy counting- house is encompassed by a heavy fog, and there is thick frost on the inside of the glass windows. A festive young boy walking outside decides to bend down to the keyhole of the front door and sing the first part of a song as he knows it, “God bless you merry gentleman! May nothing you dismay!” The response inside is immediate and violent. A man quickly grabs a ruler with such viciousness that the scared boy takes off and runs for his life, and the keyhole is once again left “to the fog and even more congenial frost.”
The Verb and the Comma
The earliest known version of the text for “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” survives in an anonymous manuscript from the 1650s (Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. b.5), which is a collection of recusant (Catholic) verse. It is unusual for manuscripts such as these to survive, but this one came from the Catholic community that was resisting the Puritan ban of Christmas in England during the 1640s and 1650s. The Puritan leadership criminalized the observance and celebration of Christmas, regarding it as a corrupt holiday that encouraged improper behavior. The carol had presumably been sung for some time before it was written down, and with older hymns and carols, the preserving and discovering of older manuscripts can be more a fortunate accident than a reliable indicator of a song’s actual age. The opening line of the text in this manuscript began “Sit you merry Gentlemen, Let nothing you Dismay,” and it became a form of private spiritual defiance and resilience in the face of public abolishment.
The first known dated printing survives in an eighteenth-century broadsheet titled Three New Christmas Carols, published in London in 1760. Broadsheets were a common form of printed material at this time for advertising, entertainment, and the news, and these single large sheets could be produced quickly and cheaply and anyone could afford them. The first line for what was titled “CAROL I. On Christmas-Day” on this sheet was now “God rest you merry Gentlemen” with no comma and included seven verses.
There are three important misconceptions regarding the title of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” which have persisted. First, the title does not mean for cheerful men to take a break. The phrase “rest you merry” has been used since at least the sixteenth century and possibly well before, and it was included in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (“God rest you merry”) and Romeo and Juliet (“rest you merry”). “Rest” in older English meant to “keep” or “make,” and “merry” meant “happy,” but it also meant “peaceful” or “strong.” So when you told someone “God rest you merry,” you were actually saying “May God grant you peace and happiness.” This usage of “rest” is closer to how we say “rest assured” today, as in you can “keep confident” that something is true.
Second, the comma belongs after “Merry” and not after “You.” Moving the comma to “God Rest You, Merry Gentlemen” turns the men into happy men, and it breaks up the vital “rest you merry” phrase which carries the meaning. Third, “Ye” should not replace “You” in the title, as seen in the more recent “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” version of the title. Publishers have substituted “Ye” in the title for this carol since the mid-nineteenth century in an attempt to make the song sound older and more traditional than it really is, which is also less grammatically correct than “You.”. There was a romantic nostalgia for the Middle Ages during the Victorian era, and part of this cultural obsession involved using “Ye Olde” language to make something more quaint and medieval. This language pervaded advertising and business names (such as the “Ye Olde Curiosity Shop”), and the practice eventually became overused by the end of the century.
Whose Door
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” was a popular song for carolers who went door to door to play for money, food, or lodging. There is an additional verse that was originally included in older versions, and it compliments the master of the household by exclaiming, “God bless the ruler of this house, and send him long to reign. And many a merry Christmas may live to see again.” The New Oxford Book of Carols labels this kind of carol as a “luck-visit tune,” and this carol was one of the most popular for these caroling groups to sing.
One could imagine how many times Scrooge had recently heard “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” that Christmas season from other carolers before finally grabbing his ruler and scaring the boy away. Although Charles Dickens does not use the exact same wording or punctuation in A Christmas Carol for this tune (using “God bless you merry gentlemen”), Dickens may have been quoting one of the many variations that existed at the time. Dickens wrote it without a comma, his printer set it without one, and the comma arrived in later editions. The front door of an owner’s home is the focus for a luck-visit song, with carolers singing blessings just outside the door, hoping the owner opens the door and provides them offerings or hospitality. Ebenezer Scrooge’s door is not the one you want to sing a luck-visit song to. He was not the first man to keep the door shut. He was only the most famous.
The Tune Nobody Owns
The history of the carol’s melody is as complex as the lyrics. The first known printing of a variant of the tune was published in 1651 by John Playford in his The English Dancing Master, a manual containing instructions and tunes for over 100 English country dances, including a tune titled “Chestnut” (or “Doves Figury”). The carol did not inherit a whole tune from “Chestnut,” it inherited a strain. The A section of “Chestnut” is very close to the first two musical lines of the current “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” but the subsequent B section did not make the transition. This kind of detachment is common over time with popular tunes, where a section or strain is pulled from its original setting and becomes re-housed in new material.
Likely the first published version of the melody as a carol appeared around 1815, in Samuel Wesley’s “The Christmas Carol, Varied as a Rondo, for the Piano Forte.” Wesley, a composer and organist who helped popularize the music of Johann Sebastian Bach in England, was the son of Charles Wesley and the nephew of John Wesley, founders of Methodism. Edward Francis Rimbault included the carol in his A Little Book of Christmas Carols published around 1846, describing how carol-singing was much less popular than it had been, but that in the city, “a solitary itinerant may be occasionally heard in the streets, croaking out ‘God rest you, merry gentlemen’ or some other old carol, to an ancient and simple tune.” William Chappell included the full current version of the “London” melody in his Popular Music of the Olden Time in 1855. Both Rimbault and Chappell moved the comma from its originally placement to after “you,” breaking up the “rest you merry” phrase.
Given the carol’s popularity, it is surprising how many recent hymnals of various denominations declined to include it in their collections. Among the hymnals which leave it out are the United Methodist Hymnal (1989), the Chalice Hymnal (1995 - Disciples of Christ), and the Glory to God Hymnal (2013 - Presbyterian Church). There is another tune for this carol known as “Cornish” or “Cornwall” that was first printed in 1833 by William Sandys and referred to as the “usual version” by The Oxford Book of Carols (1928), although it is not as well known today.
Why Minor
There is an inherent tension in the music of the popular “London” version of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” that makes it different from a majority of other Christmas songs. Even though the lyrics proclaim the narrative of the nativity providing deliverance and reassurance for all of us, the song itself is in a minor key. The song’s structure is AAB (two parallel phrases, then a contrasting phrase), followed by the refrain which briefly brightens into the relative major before resolving to the minor home key at the end. The pairing of a minor tune with a song about “comfort and joy” may seem odd initially, but this is not a slow, funereal minor melody. This is a brisk and rhythmic tune which provides gravity and resolve, rather than gloom and sorrow. Strength, not sadness.
The Other Side of the Door
While Scrooge’s singer was on the outside of the door, the Catholic recusants of the 1650s were on the inside, with the door shut against the rest of the world. The oldest copy of this carol was made by people forbidden to sing it. They kept their faith behind closed doors when public observance was banned by ordinance of Parliament. Their blessing is given before the door opens, and it does not wait to learn who is outside.
Rest you merry.
Sources and Further Reading
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. The immortal Christmas story about Ebenezer Scrooge and his ghosts.
The New Oxford Book of Carols, edited by Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott. A definitive collection of Christmas carols ranging from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century.
A Little Book of Christmas Carols, edited by Edward Rimbault. A historic mid-nineteenth-century collection of Christmas carols.
Popular Music of the Olden Time, compiled by William Chappell. A mid-nineteenth-century collection of ancient dance tunes, ballads, and songs.
Listen Along - Recommended Playlist
Listen to numerous versions of “God Rest You/Ye Merry, Gentlemen”, including recordings from the Choir of King’s College, Bing Crosby, the Robert Shaw Chorale, the Mormon Tabernacle Handbell Choir, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
Below the line, for Evergreens: the 1651 page, and what it shows.