Angels from the realms of glory, wing your flight o'er all the earth.(ANTIQUES)

The Puritans banned the observance of Christmas in early New England, and the effects of their prohibition lingered into nineteenth-century America, when the Christmas stories of Charles Dickens and Washington Irving, the poems of Clement Clarke Moore, the traditions of new immigrants, and the expansion of commerce gave birth to the holiday we know today. By the 1870s Americans eagerly decorated trees, sang carols, exchanged gifts, spent hours preparing festive meals, and eagerly awaited the arrival of Saint Nick.

Beside these secular observances, of course, were religious ones. The story of the Nativity has long been celebrated in word, song, and image, with the role played by angels often figuring prominently. Some of the most familiar lines in the Christian world are from the French carol "Angels We Have Heard on High" ("Les Anges Dans Nos Campagnes"), the Irish "Angels from the Realms of Glory," and the American carol "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear."

The term "carol" appears to be derived from choros, the Greek word for a dance in a ring, usually while singing, and for a long time the church, wary of connections to pagan round dances, issued a formidable series of denunciations and prohibitions against caroling. In the thirteenth century, however, Christian teaching shifted toward the human aspects of Jesus, and with this came an interest in the details of the Incarnation and the Nativity, and the joining of carol music and poetry began. The new carol form spread from Italy throughout Europe with the help of the Franciscans and Dominicans.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were a ...