From Folk Songs of Canada by Fowkes and Johnston.

"Jesous Ahotonhio" (now known simply as "The Huron Corol") is the first Canadian Christmas carol-—and probably the first corol of the New World. It is perhops the most represontotive of oil Canadian folk songs (or it symbolizes our triple heritoge: it wos written In the Huron language to a French tune, and is todoy widely known through its Engli»h translation

The words ore believed to hove been composed by Folher Jean de Brebeuf, a Jesuit missionary who worked among the Huron Indians from 1626 to 1649. (The Huron county stretched between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Boy, about fifty miles northwest of Toronto). Using the tune of a sixteenth-century French carol, "Une jeune pucelle" ("A Young Maiden"), Father Brebeuf told the Christmas story in terms the Indians would understand, speaking of Jesus as "the Great Spirit" and of the Wise Men as "three chiefs". His carol was probably sung first in 1641 or 1642, and thereafter each Christmas until 1649. In that year the Iroquois invaded Huronio, killing or driving out the Hurons, and torturing Fathers Brebeuf and Lalement at the stake. Some of the Hurons escaped to Lorette, near Quebec City, and it was from their descendants that another Jesuit, Father de Villeneuve, heard the carol and wrote it down about a century later. Then it was translated into French under the title. "Jesus est ne". and sung in that form in Quebec. In 1926 a Canadian poet. J. E. Middleton, wrote the English words, which are on interpretation rather than a literal translation of the original.

Regards, John