In the Oxford Book of Carols, 1928, labeled “Winter,” this text and tune are presented with the note “Words based on the Welsh New Year’s Eve secular Carol, NOS GALAN. On New Year’s Eve or Day, stanza 3, lines 1 and 5 may be changed to ‘Now we all the New Year sharing.’”

Alan Luff, secretary of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland and an authority on Welsh hymns, gives us the following about this carol: “GALAN is from ‘calan,’ which is from the Latin ‘calends,’ the first of the month. Its meaning has become narrowed down until it refers to New Year’s Day. NOS means night or eve, thus ‘New Year’s Eve’ is right. . . . Please notice that the usual Welsh words are relatively modern and the English words normally used are by no means a translation. The tune may be old, but it has come to us through the harp tradition so that it is now a very straight major mode tune. Many of these tunes either were instrumental melodies or lost their words [e.g., “All Through the Night,” “David of the White Rock”] The true vocal carol tradition in Welsh also was very free in writing new words–in fact, there are no ‘original’ words.”

Katherine Emily Roberts was born in 1877 at Leicester, England. She was educated privately at Peterborough and studied singing in London and Paris, looking forward to a professional career. In 1913 she married R.E. Roberts, and in 1933 was the organizing secretary to the Rutland Rural Community Council. She wrote a book of three historical pageants; several plays, and, with her husband, a history of Peterborough and Carol Stories, 1923.

This paraphrase of the Welsh carol was printed in the Oxford Book of Carols, 1928. In the early printings of SDAH, the birth and death dates for Katherine Roberts are incorrectly given as 1879-1953. The correct dates are 1877-1962, at Ashford, in Middlesex.

Mozart liked this melody well enough to use it in duet for violin and piano composed around the year 1700. The arrangement by Wayne Hooper (1920-    ; see Biographies).