Nordic Carols
Every year in December I begin listening to my usual Christmas albums (Praetorius Christmas Mass, Sufjan Stevens’ ten volumes of Christmas music, A Charlie Brown Christmas, etc.). It was in 2018 that I ran across a few albums of Scandinavian Christmas albums that I adored. I began cataloging theses carols—primarily from Sweden and Denmark—and quickly realized that there were hundreds of Christmas songs from the surrounding Nordic countries. The vast majority of these are unknown to English-speaking countries, and very little are found in carol collections. I therefore wanted to learn and write about them in order to eventually share them with others. Beginning in 2024, I printed a small book of 7 carols and sent them to a few friends and relatives. My hope is to continue this tradition and combine them into larger volumes of 20-25 carols with expanded overviews and original texts, as well as produce song books of the collections.