January - Deck the Halls Inspiration

Thanks to the inspiration from Mary, we have various Christmas songs for the themes to our stitching this year.  I thought this was a wonderful idea and I was pleased to see Kaye managed to add a video of the song and the lyrics too in her last post of 2017.

I thought I'd do a little research and share the results with you.  Deck the Halls is based on a Welsh song called Nos Galan dating back to the 16th Century.   The Welsh version was a New Year song which makes it particularly appropriate for January's theme.  The English words were written by a Scottish musician in 1862. 

This clip includes both English and Welsh versions

Here's a more modern version by SHeDaisy which some of you may recognise from a certain Disney movie:

And just for fun, here are some animals joining in with the song:

On to stitching.  This song provides so many ideas for our stitching.  You could chose the words Deck the Halls or Fa, La, La for a typographic design such as this one:

Drawn Thread - Deck the Halls

or this one:

Little House Needleworks - Fa La La

There are any number of designs with holly on them, with or without words.  This one is from Victoria Sampler:

Victoria Sampler - Boughs of Holly

And for a freebie there is this design from Gazette94 which I stitched in 2012.  She designed it as a New Year chart which fits rather nicely with the Welsh version of the song:

Gazette 94 - Bonne Annee

The final design I will show for inspiration is a large sampler I stitched back in 1995 from a chart in Cross Stitch Collection magazine: