“Coventry Carol” is easily the saddest song in the Advent canon. The reason we sing it today is even sadder still. But it’s one of the prettiest, and it reminds us what we’re waiting for.

An American Civil War poem dressed up as a Christmas carol, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is nothing like you think.

A simplistic poem by a little-known author, set to music by none other than Gustav Holst. “In the Bleak Midwinter” teaches us to look for Advent theology in even the most basic carols.

Tenebrae Choir - In the Bleak Midwinter

A tune without a time signature, an unsingable poem, and a name for Jesus—Rose—not found in the Bible. Somehow, the hauntingly beautiful “Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming” has become a Christmas mainstay.

Sting - Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming

An eighth-century German prayer set to a fifteenth-century French tune, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is perhaps the most Advent-y of all Advent hymns with its seven names of Jesus.

We kick off Advent with Charles Wesley’s Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus—a hymn that compresses the whole theology of Advent into a handful of lines: longing, liberation, rest, and the reign of the King.

Celtic Worship – “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus”

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