Impress your friends and family during the holiday season with these 5 popular Christmas guitar songs. Each arrangement includes melody and chords and is suitable for beginners. All the chord charts for the songs can be found here.
We Wish You a Merry Christmas (see below) is an English Christmas carol. It contains the chords G, C, A, D, D7 and A minor. The song is in 3/4 time. That means there are 3 beats per bar. Note the anacrusis in “we” at the beginning of the song. Start strumming from the word “wish”.
The second of the Christmas guitar songs in this article, Jingle Bells, uses chords G, C and D7. It was written in 1850 by James Lord Pierpont and is one of the most popular Christmas carols. The song has first and second endings. This means the first time you play through the song, you play the first ending (bar 12) and then return to bar 9. When you play it through the second time (from bar 9), skip bar 12 and jump straight to the second ending (bar 13).
The First Noel is a traditional English Christmas carol. It uses the chords C, F, G, A minor and E minor. Like We Wish You a Merry Christmas, this carol also starts with an anacrusis. Therefore, start strumming from the word “first”. The song also has first and second endings. This means the first time you play through it, you play the first ending (bar 8) and then return to bar 1. When you play through it the
second time, you play the second ending instead of the first (bar 9).
The Good King Wenceslas carol is based on the life of a man named Wenceslaus.The piece uses the chords G, D, C, D7 and E minor. This arrangement is in the key of G to allow for easy singing in both male and female vocal ranges.
The last of the Christmas guitar songs in this article is the popular carol Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. It is an English Christmas carol that appeared in 1739 in the collection Hymns and Sacred Poems. The arrangement below uses chords G, D, C, E minor, A7 and E7.
