While he claimed he had no formal training in orchestration, Arnold Bax is generally regarded as a fine orchestrator, and many commentators assert that this was his greatest skill as a composer. This is certainly arguable, as Bax usually composed for a very large orchestra, combining the instruments in numerous ways.

One of Bax's principal passions was for Ireland (another was for alcohol) and he spent many years there. At the time he composed Christmas Eve on the Mountains he was renting a house just outside of Dublin. The piece has its origins in the Irish countryside, as Bax himself once explained: "The motif of the tone poem occurred to me whilst wandering one evening last summer in the beautiful and legended Glean na Smól in County Dublin." The opening of the piece depicts the "sharp light of the frosty stars and ecstasy of peace falling for one night of the year upon the troubled Irish hills...."

In its original form, as Christmas Eve on the Mountains, the piece was given its first performance in March 1913. After revision, and re-designation 20 years later as Christmas Eve, it was not performed until 1979, after the composer's death. What few recordings there are of the piece are of the revised version, which reveals the influence of Claude Debussy, especially in the manipulation of harmonic material. Also, Bax includes a quotation of the Credo plainchant, which Richard Strauss had employed some years earlier in his Also sprach Zarathustra. Despite the similarities between it and works of great composers, Christmas Eve is not an interesting work.

Quiet, isolated notes for the harp over even quieter, sustained pitches in the winds open Christmas Eve with a musical illustration of the stars. Layers of an incipient melody rise in the woodwinds until a solo cello finally realizes in full the main theme of the piece. In symphonic fashion, this theme is then taken up by the full orchestra before a transition to a new, particularly Debussyesque tune, which itself eventually dissolves. It becomes clear at this point that we are in the midst of a Classical-era exposition, the next prominent, and highly contrasting, melody of which is a chorale-like idea, first intoned by the muted brass. After a solo trumpet performs a plaintive rendering of the tune, punctuated by a glockenspiel, the strings take up the theme, but at a much higher dynamic level.

Typically of Bax's works, the development section is short and gives way quickly to a short recapitulation in which all the themes are transformed. Material presented pp at the beginning of the piece now appears forte, and the "chorale" melody now appears majestically in the organ. Chromatic inflections, however, give the idea a sinister quality that makes it clear this is not a "joyous" Christmas piece.

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