Customer Reviews

A Treasury of Christmas Songs: Twenty-five Favorites to Sing and Play

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[This review first appeared in the "Ephrata (Pa.) Review."]
Pair an eclectic assortment of museum pieces--paintings, prints and textiles--with musical arrangements of beloved holiday songs. Adorn with tidbits of information about the music and artwork, and wrap in an attractive cover. Voilá--an alluring package.
"The Twelve Days of Christmas" is illustrated with details from an American coverlet of the late 1700s, images from a Swedish tapestry titled "Marriage at Cana" (early 1800s) and drawings from an Austrian postcard of the early 1900s. "We Three Kings" is paired with the early 15th-century painting "The Journey of the Magi" by Italian artist Stefano di Giovanni.
Guitar chords accompany the piano arrangements, which are suitable for beginning and intermediate musicians. This is a production both practical and poetic.

This is a lovely book with beautiful illustrations of favorite Christmas songs, and it contains a little introduction and background for each song.
I just wish that the songs and pictures were arranged in such a way that you didn't have to turn one or more pages to get through a song. For example, for "Angels We Have Heard on High," each verse starts on page 10, but then because of the large illustrations on pages 11-13, you have to flip to pages 12-13 to get everything after "mountains in reply" etc. So you have to flip back and forth five times during the three verses of the song, which isn't ideal for someone playing the piano or guitar. This is true of 18 of the 25 songs. I'm not sure why more of the songs aren't on facing pages. It just feels like the music was sacrificed for the art.

This is a beautiful collection of Christmas songs for the family with outstanding illustrations from museum quality art works. 25 songs are featured here in this collection. Each song has a brief introduction describing its origins or other important facts, and each image also has a description, often including historical tidbits.



The illustrations are great! If you are looking for a book of carols to just sing to or for you young musician to play this is the book to get.

We would recommend this book. The colorful illustrations make it a good book for young children to look at while singing or playing at the piano.