My mother learned new words to familiar carols when she worked on a Norwegian freighter as a young woman. Silent Night becomes Glade Jul (pronounced GLA-de yool) in Norwegian and Danish. The languages are so close that Mom (learning Norwegian fast, since there was only one English speaker on the ship) took weeks to discover that one of the crew was a Dane speaking Danish, not a Norwegian with a lingering head cold!

Click the blue words to read the Norwegian lyrics beginning "Glade jul, hellige jul." (The o with a slash through it is pronounced a, and the a with a little o above it is pronounced o. So the city of Gåssø rhymes with Rosa and not with Brasso. I think the y's say ee like the j's. Given that, it's pretty phonetic, so you should be able to sing it without making Norwegian listeners laugh too hard.) The Danish version begins "Glade jul, dejlige jul."

I loved to hear Mom sing it. It sounded beautiful. But one of her Norwegian friends said the English words were prettier. I guess a foreign language can make anything seem exotic.