Deck the Halls

The tune is Welsh, and it was a New Year's song long before it was a Christmas one. The harpist Edward Jones printed it in 1794 as Nos Galan, which means New Year's Eve, and it was already old: it is usually said to date from the sixteenth century. Haydn arranged it under that Welsh title in 1803.

The English words came later and from a Scot. Thomas Oliphant wrote them for the second volume of John Thomas's Welsh Melodies in 1862, where they were printed beside Welsh verses by the poet Talhaiarn. They are sometimes called a translation, and they are not one: the Welsh sings of a warm house, a fire and the harp on New Year's Eve. Oliphant's first version also had a drinking line in it, which an American school journal quietly took out in 1877, and the title was singular, Deck the Hall, until the 1890s.

The Welsh had something the sung carol does not. In the old air the third fa la line belonged to the harp, a flourish with no words, and the singers filled that gap with a fa la of their own. This page carries the version people sing, so every note has a syllable under it.

On a mandolin in G the carol sits in first position, from the F sharp at the fourth fret of the D course to the g at the third fret of the E course. Three of the four lines open with the same fall from the d, a dotted quarter and then a step at a time down to the G, so the thing to get right is the long first note and the short one after it. The third line is the climb, B, c, d, then e, f sharp, g across onto the E course, and the four quick e's in the last line are the one place the pick has to move.