We've all heard traditional Christmas carols like Jingle Bells and Deck the Halls, but what about The Cherry Tree Carol?

With origins traced back to the 7th century, this old song has ties to another fairly obscure tradition called Old Christmas.

Begun in 1582, Old Christmas was celebrated on January 6th, and this was followed in Appalachia up until the 1930s.

Now, the whole thing is a little complicated.

So, we turn to the good folks at the Kentucky Historical Society for some clarity.

[music playing] Unraveling the traditions of Old Christmas and how it found its way to the mountains of Appalachia involves a bit of a history lesson, and there's no better place to get things sorted out than the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort.

So, the whole concept of Old Christmas, why did that start and where did that come from?

So, Old Christmas is the tradition of celebrating Christmas Day, so the Feast of the Nativity or the birth of Jesus, on January 6th as opposed to December 25th, which we're all more familiar with.

And it goes back to a difference between the Julian calendar, so the old calendar that used to govern the Western world, to the Gregorian calendar, which is the calendar we all currently use today.

Over time, the Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar, became more and more inaccurate.

And by the late 1500s, Pope Gregory XIII was ready to make things right.

So, in 1582 on October 5th, he decreed that the next day was not going to be October 6th, 1582, it was going to be October 14th.

So, he added 10 whole days to the calendar to try to get things back in sync.

So, what used to be December 25th was now January 6th, and some people weren't very happy about that.

And that's a major clue to the mystery of how Old Christmas came to Appalachia.

So, when the Pope made the calendar shift, so Catholic countries immediately adopted it, but Protestant countries or non-Catholic countries like England didn't actually make the switch for hundreds of years.

So, Old Christmas was Christmas in England up until 1752.

So, it was a very entrenched tradition.

And a lot of people who came to Appalachia had roots in Britain, Protestant, Ireland, England, Scottish Highlands, things like that.

And the Kentucky Historical Society has some amazing Old Christmas items in its collection.

We have a book of poetry by William Aspenwall Bradley.

He was a New England journalist who came to Appalachia in 1913 to kind of interview people and then write poetry about what he found.

He wrote a whole poem called Old Christmas that tells of that tradition of animals kind of speaking and kneeling in the barnyard.

It's this beautiful verse that kind of encapsulates what Appalachian old Christmas felt like.

[music playing] They's heaps o' folks here still believe On Christmas—that's Old Christmas—Eve The elders bloom upon the ground And critters low and kneel around In every stall, though none I know has seen them kneel, or heard them low... Another Old Christmas tradition that was popular in Appalachia is The Cherry Tree Carol.

So, the Cherry Tree Carol, again we're going back in history, it goes all the way back to a story in the 7th century, a story about Mary and Joseph on the flight into Egypt with the child Jesus.

So, they're stuck in the desert, Mary's getting faint, it's hot, and she wants dates from a date tree but she can't reach them.

And so, her baby Jesus miraculously has the date tree kind of bend down to give her this fruit.

And this is a very popular story.

It was recirculated and told a lot and then passed down.

Eventually, it gets to England, again we come back to England, and it's changed a bit.

It turns into a story, now it's cherries instead of dates.

It's now not the flight into Egypt, it's actually Mary is still pregnant, and Joseph doesn't wanna pick fruit for her because he thinks that she's cheated on him, which is not true.

But the core is the same, and it gets turned into a song.

So, a folk ballad, a kind of religious song that gets played at religious festivals and things.

But it's the same story all throughout this time.

And again, that song comes from medieval England and then back into an Appalachian folk song.

[music playing] [“The Cherry Tree Carol” song playing] I think Old Christmas reminds us kind of what Christmas really means.

I think remembering how people celebrated in the past can help us decide what traditions we want to celebrate and what we want to pass down to the future, and reminding us that we're all connected throughout history.

So, the things that we do today don't exist in a vacuum, and we're building on things that came before us that are related to medieval songs and old calendars and Appalachian traditions and folk tales, that we're all in kind of this one big story together.

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