A long time ago in a parish far far away a liturgy team put together the Christmas liturgy of all time. Instead of a few hoary old carols there was a pre-mass extravanganza of readings and marvellously selected songs like a carols and lessons service. The mass liturgy itself was innovative, polished and practiced and was delivered with perfection and passion by the enthusiastic musicians and singers and liturgists.
… and didn’t the poor priest cop it. “We just wanted to sing carols, see the inside of a church for a change and get out,” said the less regular parishioners to their perplexed shepherd.
Hence selections for Christmas 2026 – as close as possible to 2025, 2024, etc ad infinitum.
Midnight Mass in George Town will of course be at 9pm with carols from 8.30pm. It will be still be light and something approaching summer weather has finally arrived in Tasmania.
Carols before Mass:
Hark the Herald Angels Sing
Once in Royal David’s City
The First Noel
Star Child (Murray/Young)
Angels We Have Heard On High
Mary’s Boy Child
Mass of St Francis – as always – it’s the only one the assembly here knows.
Entrance: O Come All Ye Faithful
Christmas Psalm (Farrell)
Celtic Alleluia
Gifts: Away in a Manger
Communion: Silent Night
O Holy Night
Recessional: Joy to the World
We have a combined churches Carols night tonight, and all the arrangements of all the carols are different to what we will play next week so I will quickly have to unlearn all the tweaks for tonight.
Thank you to Chris W and Ryan for broadening the palate of music suggestions here for all these years and providing a rolling resource for years to come. All contributions of music selections are gratefully accepted – I have discovered many interesting hymns over the years from this source and I appreciate it.
This blog gets 700-1000 hits a day. It used to be mainly Australia and the US but recently there is a lot of traffic from China for some reason. There are also hits from all over the world. I can tell music groups are using it for practice because a random song will suddenly have hundreds of hits out of the blue. I hope it is still of use to people putting together liturgies.
Merry Christmas.
Obviously things are very different at a cathedral compared to a country parish, but anyone wanting to see a carol service inspired by Nine Carols and Lessons followed by a midnight Mass at midnight, should have a look in at St Mary’s Cathedral, Hobart on YouTube. The livestream starts at 11pm and the link: https://www.youtube.com/live/B1lf9IfpBNg?si=GFNjhzXVojKck8Dq. You can also find it here: https://www.youtube.com/@ArchdioceseofHobart. Despite the late hour, the cathedral was nearly full by the time Mass started last year.
Your Chinese viewers might be bots looking to see if there is anything (in their eyes) worth damaging or stealing. A few months ago my site had a spike of thousands of pages viewed from Vietnam of all places!