Christmas Carol Book. Expanded Edition

Christmas songbook. Third, expanded edition.

The publication contains forty Ukrainian carols and festive songs from across Ukraine.

INFORMATION

The songbook brings together forty carols and festive songs from different corners of Ukraine. Some have been known for generations and have long been favorites, while others are little known, with unexpected stories and their own histories of origin; together, they provide a fairly complete picture of how Ukrainian Christmas sounds from the Carpathians to Slobozhanshchyna.

This is the third edition, expanded with ten new songs. Among them are Lesya Ukrainka’s original carol “Oh, in Paradise, in Paradise, Near the Danube,” an ancient St. Sophia’s carol, the Baroque “Do Not Weep, Rachel,” and the Plascun carol “A Star Flashed in the Sky,” which is sung as the Bethlehem flame is passed from person to person.

The carol and the festive song are perhaps the only Ukrainian ritual genres that have reached us alive, without reconstruction: the same texts are sung in families, choirs, and at nativity plays. That is precisely why such songbooks are published again and again, each time expanded with newly discovered songs.