My favourite thing about Christmas is singing Christmas hymns! I love so many of them that it's hard to pick a favourite.
I do particularly like What Child is This? because of its minor key, which makes it sound mysterious and intriguing (like the baby Jesus!). I also love “whom angels greet with anthems sweet” — it takes me to the stable that night where all is still and silent but for the angels greeting the babe for the first time. (I love how the hymn always uses babe instead of baby!)
The third reason is of course because I love Greensleeves, the tune to which it is sung. It has such a familiar sound and interesting history. It was apparently first licensed or registered in 1580 to a Richard Jones (with a set of lyrics that were not in the least religious, or even very respectable), but it is probably older still. Some theories have it that Henry VIII wrote the song. In any event, Henry's daughter Queen Elizabeth is said to have danced to it; Shakespeare mentioned it by name twice in The Merry Wives of Windsor; and traitors were hanged as hired bands of musicians played its strains in lugubrious tempo. Almost three centuries later, about 1865, William Chatterton Dix published The Manger Throne. Three stanzas were later culled from that poem and fitted to Greensleeves, thus creating What Child Is This?
As for hymns that are not my favourites (slight euphemism there): The First Noel and We Three Kings. I had to play them on the piano for a Christmas recital when I was little and the amount of practising required in order to play them without the music in front of me created a slight disdain in my heart that hasn't really gone away with age. (I had hoped it would!) Too much of a good thing I guess!
