After years of the same canonical carols, you’re probably sick of figgy pudding. If you prefer gentler, less imperative sing-alongs, we dug up some of the yuletide season’s greatest B-sides—all with food lyrics you’ve never heard before. Grab some friends and start rehearsing!
1. “Fum, Fum, Fum”
This Catalan carol is believed to date back to the 16th or 17th century. No one is quite sure what “fum” means—it’s the Catalan word for smoke, though it might also serve as onomatopoeia for a rocking cradle—but the songwriters’ love of candy and feasting is conveyed with joyous clarity.
2. Boar’s Head Carol
An English carol from the 15th century, “Boar’s Head” celebrates the time-honored tradition of slaughtering a sacrificial boar and bringing its head to your Yuletide feast. (Try this at your next holiday party.)
3. Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella
Ah, yes, it’s just not Christmas without Jeanette and Isabella and their festive holiday flames. First published in 1553, this French carol is mostly about two girls and their quest to tell the townspeople that Christ is born—but then they celebrate:
4. “El Noi de la Mare” (The Child of the Mother)
A (very) rough Google translation suggests that this traditional Catalan carol is teeming with talk of figs and raisins—and “the fillet of Mary.”
5. The Cherry Tree Carol
This sort of thing happens all the time: a lady tells a gentleman that she’s pregnant and asks for some fresh, orchard-picked cherries; the gentleman gets all huffy and is like, “Why don’t you get the kid’s dad to pick those berries, because I know it ain’t me”; and lo, Jesus pipes up from within the lady’s womb and says, “Hey, I’m the son of man, give these folks some cherries, trees.”
6. Christmas Is Coming
In which the pending holiday is an excuse to beg your friends shamelessly for turkey, cider, and nog.
7. Noche Buena
The noche buena is a Filipino feast held on Christmas Eve just before midnight—this carol celebrates some of the traditional dishes, like tinolang manok, a chicken and papaya soup, and lechon, a roasted suckling pig.
8. Adam Lay Ybounden
The most unusual carol of the bunch is also, perhaps, the oldest—this recounting of Genesis makes a strange argument: It’s good that Adam ate the apple, because if he hadn’t, we never would’ve gotten to meet Jesus. And as for all that “fall of man” postlapsarian business? Who cares!