1) This was a matter of personal promise - I hate the bloody song anyway, but it finds a place in The Northumbrian Minstrelsy of 1882 so I suppose there must be something in it.

2) Either way TTDOC has haunted me since childhood when I would dread Christmas if only because my father insisted on singing the bloody thing every day between Christmas Day and Epiphany, one verse one day, two verses the next, and so on.

3) Christmas 1979 was weird anyway - the dark and cold had seeped into my bones and with it a gloomy 'flu that underlined the utter misery of the season that had me withdrawing from all human company even though they seemed especially persistent that year.

4) I suffered (boldly, stoically) an endless string of merry visitors intent on cheering me up with festive fare and all manner of fiddle-faddle in which other years I would have been delighted to partake, but the more miserable I became the more they persisted in trying to cheer me up - and the more they persisted in trying to cheer me up, so the more miserable I became.

5) It was worth it in the end though, because once they'd gone home (which they did at the end of each day simply because I turfed them out on their collective ear) I found in their absence a peace in which to confront my various Seasonal Demons - the innumerable Ghosts of Christmases Past which ordinarily I might welcome along with my so-called friends.

6) They too, alas, proved more persistent than other years, so I set about a method of exorcism to purge these wretched spectres once and for all - or else entertain them, or become possessed by them, for what else is true musical creativity but a shamanic seance of true possession?

7) It was, after all, a simple enough procedure - each night I recorded an improvisation in memory of my father's seasonal tradition of singing TTDOC, even down to attempting to do each in a different key, and used that as a springboard into the realm of mystery that awaited me in the gloaming.

8) Father called it The 12 Keys of Christmas, but that idea went adrift, as did the melody here and there, as, indeed, was Father's wont, for he wasn't overly keen on the accidental in verse 5 which, he insisted, he had good reason to believe was a later addition.

9) My father was a staunch traditionalist and early member of the English Folksong Society. I remember him setting off on his bicycle on Saturday mornings to pester the local peasantry for their old songs.

10) These he would transcribe in exacting detail, noting each variation with particular glee, even from one week to the next, insisting that if a particular singer never sang the same song the same way twice it was evidence that a particular song was well and truly alive.

11) Father took a keen interest in the lives of his singers too, amassing more biographical information than he ever did songs, all of which remains unpublished in my attics awaiting the attention of a more dedicated folk-type person than I ever was, or indeed am.

12) Father's ghost is the most welcome of all at Christmastide; each of these pieces opens out into a landscape of forgotten years in which I might roam afresh, using the ancient melody as a gateway to that which is, in its own small way, not so much touched by the divine but the very source of it.

Amen, amen, amen / Io, Io, Io!

Hermione Harvestman, December 2003.

PS - Coming soon : Epiphany 1977