To download the song, either right-click (Mac: ctrl+click) the player above and select ‘save audio as’, or right-click (Mac: ctrl+click) this link and select ‘save link as‘.
Like a lot of Christmas carols, this is a folksong requisitioned for Christmas. Since we still put trees in our houses for a month of every year, despite the cost and the mess, I guess that makes us by default more on the pagan side than the godly, which is a nice thought.
It was only last week that the teacher I was playing for drew my attention to the fact that this is a little mazurka (by mazurka-ing around the studio gamely while I was playing it). I was going to make this into a huge, comedy mazurka like the one from Jerome Robbins The Concert, but then after hearing an advert on TV with every musical christmas decoration going (harps, celestas, glockenspiels) I thought maybe this tune needed the mazurka taken out of it a bit, rathen injected into it like one of those water-injected Christmas turkeys, so here it is, a Tannenbaum decorated as tastelessly as the tree in your local pub.
