Hark! The stories of our favorite Christmas carols - AVAILABLE NOW

“O Little Town of Bethlehem” has shaped how millions of English speakers imagine the Palestinian town where Jesus was born: a small place, still and peaceful, resting under the stars. The wars and struggles of recent decades invite us to question whether that image is true. And yet, “Bethlehem is still a very little town,” says Stephanie Saldaña, a writer and mother raising her family in this religiously and culturally diverse place. “It is a small place where everybody knows each other.”

Did you know that when a ewe rejects her newborn lamb, the shepherd has only hours to convince her to nurse it—or the lamb will die? This is the work of shepherds—staying awake through the night when lambs are being born, watching closely, ready to step in and save them. It gives new meaning to the good shepherd. In this episode, host Maggi Van Dorn travels to a farm in Herefordshire, near the Welsh border, to understand shepherding, and discovers why God might have chosen shepherds to be the first to hear the good news.

We often imagine angels as gentle and serene. But in Scripture they arrive in blinding light and overwhelming sound—so much so that their first words are almost always “Do not be afraid.” These are the messengers who burst into the night sky to meet a group of poor, worn-out shepherds—outsiders who become the first to hear the news of Christ’s birth.

Most Christmas carols celebrate the birth of Jesus. But not “The Coventry Carol,” the premiere episode of “Hark!” season five. This song centers on a biblical horror: the “massacre of the innocents,” King Herod’s order to kill all male babies two years old and under in Bethlehem. It’s a lullaby sung by mothers to children who may not survive the night.

On the final episode of Hark! this season, prepare yourselves for a wee bit of scandal because we’re looking at a tune that began as a bawdy love song and has long been associated with an evil monarch, but which, over the course of three centuries, finds its redemption as a Christmas carol. This is the story behind, “What Child Is This?”