Christmas 2024

holidays
Author

Joey Stanley

Published

December 4, 2024

Modified

December 20, 2024

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 9 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 Iron Rod (#274), I Stand All Amazed (#193), and I Believe in Christ (#134). I don’t know why they didn’t sing Christmas hymns well into December, but it just goes to show that it does happen very occasionally.

The following plot shows an estimate of the cumulative number of Christmas hymns a ward sings over the course of the month of December.

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 three weeks into December, and just over half of wards have sung six congregational Christmas hymns, with most of the rest singing more than that.

Conclusion

That’s it for now! Stay tuned for more updates each week this month!