Twenty-two carols spanning more than six centuries: some of these carols have long been widely known and loved, others have become so thanks to the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge, and a few were newly written. But all of them focus on the central event of the Christmas story—the birth at Bethlehem—and on the characters in that story: the angels, the shepherds, the wise men, and the mother with her child.