Music of Christmas 7

A remarkable a cappella version of a very popular Christmas carol:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ_MGWio-vc

The carol was written by Katherine Kennicott Davis, an American classical music composer and teacher, in 1941.  (She originally called it “The Carol of the Drum.”)  The Trapp Family Singers — think The Sound of Music — recorded it in 1955 and it became even more popular when the Harry Simeone Chorale recorded it in 1958.

I’m guessing that the latter may have been the version that I first encountered; I vaguely remember hearing the carol as “new” when I was a very little boy — on the radio, while riding in our family car down the main drag in Alhambra, California, underneath the street’s Christmas lights, which were a highly anticipated and wonder-inducing sign of the season every year of my childhood — and loving it.  That was a magical moment, which is why it remains, among my earliest memories.