Charles Ives is so strongly identified with innovation and experimentation in music that it is easy to overlook his mastery of traditional forms and harmonies. Although traditionalism was occasionally forced upon him by his teachers at Yale, his father, the band-master George Ives, took him through the standard harmony book of the time by the German theorist Salomon Jadassohn and made sure he mastered it. (It was O.K. for young Charlie to experiment, was George's point of view, as long as he had a firm foundation.)

Later Charles would study with Horatio Parker at Yale, who would take him (to the younger composer's distress) through Jadassohn again, and discourage experimentation.

But before he started Yale in 1894 (or perhaps early in his freshman year) Ives wrote this lovely and tender Christmas Carol on his own words. It shows no traces of being an uncertain student's composition. While it is not a particularly original song, it is on a level with what the better composers of America and Europe would have accomplished in the same mood: A fully professional, singable, and attractive song. There can be little doubt that Ives would have made it as a composer had he not made the decision, sometime between his Yale graduation of 1898 and his resigning his last paid post as church organist, to make his living in business and devote his musical efforts to working out his radical new style.

The song is in the pastoral key of F, in 6/8 time. It has the gentle rocking rhythm of a lullaby and an intimate, crooning melody. Considerate of home singers who he might have hoped would sing it, Ives keeps his melody with a span of less than an octave, and the melodic motion is predominantly stepwise, with the widest interval being a major third.

The piano accompaniment's top line supports the singer throughout with the melody, usually harmonies in parallel thirds. The song is entirely diatonic (except for one E flat in the piano part), and it shows Ives' mastery of harmony within the confines of one key; the accidental already alluded to is part of an F7 chord and so tends to support the main key and, moreover, comes at just the right moment to add a small bit of aural variety when needed.

Although not usually mentioned in connection with Ives' historic contribution to musical evolution, this is a very attractive song with the sense of artlessness that is usually the result of high art, painstakingly applied.

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