For many years The York Waits have provided a soundtrack to the festive seasons of England and Europe from the 1400s to the early 1700s. Three of the group’s recordings have focused on Christmas music, including some of the very earliest carols, dating from the 15th century, plus elaborate 16th and 17th century settings of Lutheran chorales and songs that are still familiar, such as “In Dulci Jubilo”. There have been folk carols from around Europe and music that reflects the hardships and the jollities of the “Little Ice Age” that gripped England in the Tudor and Jacobean periods. The title of 2025’s sequence of Christmas concerts is “Welcome Yule”, taken from one of earliest English carols, and the Waits are based in a city where rumbustious celebrations of the old Norse Yuletide carried on till the late 1500s and have been revived today. After their final concert on December 21, the Waits head back to York to lead a procession around its streets that heralds the arrival of the 12 Days of Christmas, with an ancient proclamation that is read at some of the city’s most historic places, including the Minster and the Mansion House.
