Most Popular Carols

It’s hard to get exact numbers on how popular carols are. We have several sources we could use and all will provide different answers to the question. For instance opinion polls taken tend to ask the question of favourite carol, which differs from popularity even if often the two factors will go together. For our table below we’ve used a simple measure which nevertheless has its downsides. This is how many people search for the carol each year in Google with figures that are rounded up or down. This way of measuring popularity does have potential pitfalls – searches for a carol might represent confusion over the lyrics rather than popularity for instance – and also a carol might be more popular among those who don’t tend to use the internet and therefore might be underrepresented. There’s other issues too when Carol names have other meanings – for instance Silent Night is also a bed company while We Three Kings is also a film, so the figures are distorted upwards by these other meanings. Nevertheless this seems the best data to go on for carol popularity.