Christmas 2024
holidays
Last year, I did a detailed analysis of Christmas hymns. This year, things have changed a little bit because of the introduction of some new hymns. So, in this post I’ll give a brief look at what Christmas hymns are sung. It’ll be similar in style to my ongoing post about the second batch of new hymns, and I’ll update it weekly until a negligible number of wards sing Christmas hymns.
First, what proportion of wards are singing Christmas hymns? The following plot shows the number of wards singing the number of Christmas hymsn per week. To make it easier to read, I’ve included the month of November, just so that there’s a little bit of context. And yes, there were some wards that sang Christmas hymns in November, mostly wards outside the US since they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving during that time, but also shout-out to a ward in Arizona that sang a Christmas hymn on November 17th! Anyway, the plot is a little confusing to look at, so let’s see if I can explain it.
First, we’ll start with the gray line, which represents wards singing zero Christmas hymns. It’s near the top during November and then quickly falls to the bottom. This means during November, the majorirty of wards I have data from sang zero Christmas hymns. But as soon as December hit, most wards sing at least one Christmas hymn. (But not all, as we’ll see below!)
Let’s move on to the blue lines, which represent the total number of Christmas hymns being sung. The darker line shows the number of wards that sing two or more Christmas hymns while the lighter line is for wards that sing exactly one. On December 1st, around 85% of wards sang two Christmas hymns, while just about 13% or so sang just one. Those numbers went up on December 8th and 15th.
The green, red, and orange lines give us a little insight into which hymns are sung. We’ll start with the green lines. They’re labeled “old” Christmas hymns, meaning they come from the 1985 hymnal. Most of the Christmas hymns come from this selection, which makes sense because there are more of them. Roughly two-thirds of wards sing two hymns from the existing hymnal with another 25% or so singing just one. With the red lines, we see that another 30% of wards sing one new hymn and a small number of wards sing two new hymns. Finally, I put the orange line in there because very occasionally, a ward will sing a Christmas song from the Children’s Songbook.
How many Christmas hymns have wards sung so far?
Turning the question on its head then, we can now focus on individual wards and see how many Christmas hymns wards have sung so far.
First off, there were 103 sacrament meetings in December that I have data from that did not include any congregational Christmas hymns. One example was from a ward in Nevada. On December 8th, they sang
The following plot shows an estimate of the cumulative number of Christmas hymns a ward sings over the course of the month of December.
Note
A little explanation of this plot might be necessary to fully understand it. When I collect my data, a lot of my data comes from the same wards each week, but a lot also comes from various other one-off contributions from people. So, the data for some wards is complete while for others it’s not. That means I might have a complete dataset for some wards for the entire month and for other wards there might be just one or two contributions.
So, the plot below shows that of the wards I have just one week of data from, around 81% of them sang two Christmas hymns. That doesn’t mean that 81% of wards will necessarily sing two Christmas hymn on the first Sunday of the month. (Although, the plot above, I show that it’s more like 85%.) It just means given one random week out of the month, the majority sing just two. A few wards will sing fewer than that and a few will sing more.
See here for a similar plot, but applied to the first batch of new hymns.
So, as expected, the more data I have from a ward, the more Christmas hymns I observe them singing. Currently, we’re four weeks into December, and the most common pattern is for a ward to have sung between 8 and 10 Christmas hymns this year.
What Christmas hymns have been most popular?
The following plot shows the estimated number of times each Christmas hymn is estimated to have been sung per ward this year. It’s estimated that almost every ward sang
Interspersed among these hymns are new hymns. Of them,
The following table shows the same data plotted above but in table format so you can see the exact numbers.
| Approximate percentage of wards Christmas hymns have been sung in | |
|---|---|
| Since December 1st | |
| Hymn | percent of wards |
| Joy to the World (201) | 95% |
| Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful (202) | 90% |
| Hark! the Herald Angels Sing (209) | 89% |
| Silent Night (204) | 88% |
| Angels We Have Heard on High (203) | 81% |
| Away in a Manger (206) | 68% |
| The First Noel (213) | 64% |
| O Little Town of Bethlehem (208) | 62% |
| What Child is This? (1203) | 58% |
| Far, Far Away on Judea's Plains (212) | 56% |
| It Came upon the Midnight Clear (207) | 54% |
| Jesus, Once of Humble Birth (196) | 53% |
| With Wondering Awe (210) | 50% |
| I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day (214) | 48% |
| He Is Born, the Divine Christ Child (1202) | 41% |
| Once in Royal David's City (205) | 29% |
| Star Bright (1204) | 22% |
| While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks (211) | 20% |
| Come, Lord Jesus (1018) | 13% |
Comparison to previous years
This year, we introduced about four new Christmas hymns. Presumably, wards didn’t simply add them to their existing programs. There are, after all, a finite number of hymns a ward can sing in December. So, by incorporating new Christmas hymns, some hymns had to get cut. So, which hymns got cut and were some hymns cut more than others?
The following plot shows hymns in order of of how much more or less they were sung in 2024 compared to all the previous years I have data for. The way you read it is this: if the number is positive, it means the hymn was that much more common this year (e.g. “Away in a Manger was about 7% more common in 2024”) but if it’s negative, it means the hymn was that much less common this year (e.g. “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks was a little over 40% less common in 2024”).
This is a pretty cool look at the characteristics of the 2024 season. A few of the more common hymns were a little bit more common this year. But, keep in mind that these are congregational hymns. It may not simply be that the most popular ones are getting even more popular. I think what’s happening is that more wards choirs and other musical ensembles are singing/playing the new hymns, so in order to not hear the same Christmas hymn more than once per year, the music coordinator works around those. That means hymns that had been sung as choir pieces or as special musical numbers previously are now being shifted to the congregation. This is just speculation and since I haven’t been collecting data on the special musical numbers themselves, I’ll never know. But it’s plausible.
Most hymns were less common in 2024 than they were previously. They’re the ones towards the right and bottom of the plot in red. I think these are the ones that are being left out in favor of the new hymns. Given the choice between
Statistical analysis for nerds :)
Is there anything special about that order? Maybe it’s just the case that the new hymns were sung at the expense of the most popular hymns the least at the least popular hymns the most. In other words, perhaps there’s a correlation between how popular a hymn is generally and how much more (or less) popular it was in 2024. Well, let’s look at that correlation.
The plot shows that correlation is there (ρ = 0.55) and is statistically significant (p = 0.035). However, in this plot, I’ve colored the values based on how far off they are from where we’d expect them to be if there was a perfect correlation (for any statisticians reading this, it’s their residuals). More popular hymns are towards the right and less popular are to the left (based on data prior to 2024). Meanwhile, how much more or less common a hymn was in 2024 is shown on the y-axis, with hymns sung far more than normal higher up and far less than normal towards the bottom. Points outside of the shaded area could be considered noteworthy, or rather, significantly more or less popular given how popular that hymn has historically been.
Here we see that
So, this plot just shows that each hymn has its own story. It’s not clear to me why these differences happened in 2024 the way they did. Perhaps it has something to do with the new hymns. But perhaps it’s something else. (It could also be the case that if I ran the numbers for any year, I’d find big differences like these, which would mean 2024 is nothing special!)
Conclusion
That’s it for now! Hopefully this analysis of the 2024 Christmas season has been interesting. This is a special year because of the introduction of new Christmas hymns, so it’s pretty cool to see how that has affected the trend for the past few years.