Our church choir has a tradition of carolling around the rest homes in the Wellington area and it usually seems to be appreciated. But of course, these are old or very old people who usually know the songs and respect them.

I agree with those who feel that the English choral tradition will tend to preserve Christmas carols as a genre, but - to be a bit contentious - I also think that most of the carols you tend to hear while out and about at this season don't actually have a lot to say about Christian theology and aren't really worth preserving on that score alone.

As an aside, I have recently been working in a retail establishment and if I hear "Well, Here it is, Merry Christmas!" by Slade one more time this year, I won't be held responsible!

And as for "contemporary-praise-chorus-anthems" and the Christian music-as-Big-Business thing, couldn't agree more. I play the guitar in our church music groups and have had to play quite a lot of this stuff in recent years. To be fair, some of it is good, some not so good. But both our minister and his assistant are both young, and while both are devout, well educated people, neither have any kind of musical background so tend to be a bit undiscriminating. And there seems to be no end of contemporary authors who are only too pleased to write hymns with new "relevant" politically-correct words, with generally fairly insipid sentiments, which can be fitted to old classic melodies. Oh well, don't get me started!