Like it or not, if you want your choir to sing well at Christmas, you have to start your Christmas preparations in about October.  Unfortunately this means that if you choose repertoire that is anything other than glorious you will be sick to death of it and loathing all mention of the festive season by mid to late November.

So, the only solution is to plan carefully, and to choose gorgeous music that will keep you and your choir (and your audiences) happy throughout the festive season.

For the traditional Christmas Carol concert you can't do much better than starting with the Carols For Choir series. This has all the traditional carols in the sorts of arrangements you have grown up hearing. In this case tradition and familiarity has merit. A good carol has been a good carol for several hundred years and will remain so for many hundreds more. What's more, there is something very satisfying about teaching a junior choir the descant part to O Come All Ye Faithful, knowing it will be with them for life. My sister in law and I still belt it out from the front pew every Christmas morning in our little local church, much to the surprise (and pleasure I hope!) of those around us.

Some of Carols for Choirs is for a four part SATB mixed voice choir, and so is less suitable for a childrens choir, but book 4 has lots of SA and SSA arrangements for upper voices which are a good place to start for a choir which is used to singing in parts and can cope with a reasonable level of sophistication.

For some lesser known but beautifyl carols, try Patrick Hadley's "I sing of a maiden" which also appears in Carols for Choirs book 2.

Beyond Carols for Choirs there is an absolutely fabulous trio by Britten called 'A Wealden Trio: Christmas Song of the Women' It sounds quite tricky, but in my opinion its beautiful.

Another good book is the Novello publication Merrily on High which is edited by Barry Rose. The music varies from fairly straightforward to decidedly tricky, but I successfully used a number of these carols with my upper voice (non-auditioned) school choir.

If you wanted to go towards something a little complicated you could get the original setting of Ceremony of Carols, which is for SSA.

There are lots of movements that can be done on their own very successfully if you don't want to do the whole thing. For example: Deo Gracias or This Little Babe. Have a listen to these below.

For great value and lots of variety try the Faber Carol Book which is very reasonably priced and full of a huge variety of things. This is a great place to look if you want to add an international slant to a Christmas concert of to give the children a broader range of musical styles. For example there's Moon Dance (India), A Polish Lullaby (Poland), Shiao Bao Bao (China), Silent Night (gospel version - Germany), Il est ne (France) and plenty more.

Keep an eye out too for a little book called 'Eight Christmas Carols from Europe' (for voices, tuned percussion and piano) published by Bedwin Mills which has some super and unusal items.

Finally for the international theme, there's the Huron Carol which is very simple and is from Canada.

 Not everybody wants to sing traditional Christmas carols all the time - there is plenty of Christmas music of a secular nature which a young choir will enjoy and which audiences will love to listen to.

Try the Novello Youth Choral book for SSA - This contains amongst other things  All I want for Christmas is you, The Christmas song, The Christmas Waltz, Home for the holidays, Winter wonderland

Young voices Christmas is a a rich source and has enough of a challenge and a satisfying final performance to keep you and your choir interested.

If you are looking for sheet music rather than a standard Carol book, then here is a list of sheet music to look out for that come highly recommended:

Two Parts

• Ding dong merrily on high, arr. Geehl.
• Christmas is here!
• The Little Road to Bethlehem, Head.
• Twelve days of Christmas arr. Geehl
• The cradle in Bethlehem, Quilter.
• Gloria in Excelsis Deo, Thiman
• Rudolph the Red nosed reindeer arr. Wilson
• Come to Bethlehem, Warlock, arr. Jacobson
• Silent night arr. Foote
• The First Noel/Pachebel's Canon arr, Clawson 2 part
• Candlelight Silent Night arr. Snyder 2 part with an optional 3 part treble
• The Best Christmas of all (Disney), arr. MacHuff 2 part
  

Three Parts

• Why not buy an extra present? Westmore SSA
• Christmas Jazz (3 separate songs - Carol of the Bells, Jingle Bells, We wish you a merry Christmas) arr. Shaw SSA
• A Bach Merry Christmas, arr. Frackenpohl
• The Christmas Song arr. Ringwald SSA with solo soprano
• Twelve days after Christmas, Silver S(S)A - a great fun song which always goes down well!
• A present Fur Elise, Beethoven, arr. Brownsey & Lantz SSA