Editing Christmas music (section)

===Early secular Christmas songs===
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Among the earliest secular Christmas songs was "[[The Twelve Days of Christmas (song)|The Twelve Days of Christmas]]", which first appeared in 1780 in England, though its melody would not come until 1909.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Anonymous |url=https://archive.org/details/mirth_without_mischief/page/n3/mode/2up |title=Mirth Without Mischief |date=1800}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Frederic Austin |url=https://archive.org/details/austin_1909 |title=The Twelve Days of Christmas |date=1909-01-01}}</ref> The English West Country carol "[[We Wish You a Merry Christmas]]" has antecedents dating to the 1830s but was not published in its modern form until Arthur Warrell introduced it to a wider audience in 1935. As the secular mythos of the holiday (such as [[Santa Claus]] in his modern form) emerged in the 19th century, so too did secular Christmas songs. [[Benjamin Hanby]]'s "[[Up on the House Top]]" and [[Emily Huntington Miller]]'s "[[Jolly Old Saint Nicholas]]" were among the first explicitly secular Christmas songs in the United States, both dating to the 1860s; they were preceded by "[[Jingle Bells]]", written in 1857 but not explicitly about Christmas, and "[[O Tannenbaum|O Christmas Tree]]," written in 1824 but only made about a Christmas tree after being translated from its original German.