Best Christmas songbooks for guitar

Buy Christmas Songs in the Really Easy Guitar series for about ten dollars. It is twenty-two popular Christmas songs printed as chords, lyrics and basic tab, which is the only notation a first-year guitarist can read at speed. Every other book on this page is the right answer to a narrower situation, and the situation is always about notation rather than about songs.

We have not performed from any of these books. What we have done is read every publisher’s own product page — song counts, page counts, arrangement style and stated level all come from Hal Leonard and Faber directly, and they are cited at the bottom. That matters more than usual here, because the listings for Christmas songbooks are keyword-stuffed to the point of being misleading: two of the six are advertised with features the publisher does not claim.

The only specification that matters

A Christmas guitar book can be printed in four different ways and the covers do not tell you which. Here is what each one asks of the player.

Chords and lyrics only. Chord symbols above the words, no melody, no tab. Needs: the ability to play about six open chords and change between them. Produces: nothing recognizable without a singer. This is the Guitar Chord Songbook#ad format, and for accompanying a room it is the best of the lot — eighty carols in 168 pocket-sized pages.

Chords, lyrics and basic tab. The same, plus a tab line for the riff or the melody fragment. Needs: open chords and nothing else. This is Really Easy Guitar#ad, which is why it is the pick.

Easy Guitar arrangements in standard notation. Melody written on the staff with chord symbols. Needs: the ability to read notes. Produces: something that works solo. Hal Leonard’s Christmas Carols for Easy Guitar#ad is this, and its product page carries the line that decides everything: this book does not contain tablature.

Notes and tab together, arranged as solos. Melody and harmony in one part. Needs: fingerstyle technique and roughly a year of playing. Fingerpicking Christmas#ad says intermediate on the tin and means it.

Carols and Christmas songs are different books

Publishers do not help here. “Christmas Carols” and “Christmas Songs” are different repertoire with almost no overlap, and the two books sit next to each other on a shelf looking the same.

The carols are traditional and mostly out of copyright: Silent Night, The First Noel, O Come O Come Immanuel, Good King Wenceslas. That is what a family sings. The songs are twentieth-century: Blue Christmas, Let It Snow, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Winter Wonderland. That is what plays in a shop.

A gift-giver who gets this backwards buys a perfectly good book the recipient does not want. Ask yourself which half of Christmas music the player actually likes, then buy from that column.

The picks

Christmas Songs, Really Easy Guitar#ad is the book to buy. Hal Leonard publishes it as 22 songs with chords, lyrics and basic tab across 40 pages, in the series whose whole premise is easy-to-follow charts that get you playing right away. The song list is the pop canon — Blue Christmas, Let It Snow, Silver Bells, Winter Wonderland, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Buy it if the player is inside their first year. Skip it if they want carols, or if they are past strumming and want a real arrangement. One honest note: stock was into double figures rather than hundreds when we checked, so this is a now purchase, not a December 20 purchase.

Christmas Carols, Guitar Chord Songbook#ad is eighty carols, lyrics and chords, 168 pages at 6 by 9 inches. The format is the point: a small book stays open on a music stand and does not slide off a knee, and the lyrics are printed because whoever holds the guitar ends up leading the singing. Buy it if there will be people in the room. Skip it if the player wants to play Christmas music alone — there is no tune in this book.

Easy Pop Christmas Melodies#ad is the one that keeps working in January. It is a Hal Leonard method supplement: fifteen songs of the season, cross-referenced page by page with Guitar Method Book 1, with online play-along audio that includes a full rhythm section. Buy it if there is a method book or a teacher in the picture. Skip it if the player is entirely self-taught from videos, because the cross-references are the product and they point at a book they do not own.

Christmas Carols for Easy Guitar#ad is twenty-four traditional carols in 32 pages, including Carol of the Bells and O Come O Come Immanuel, and it is the cheapest route to the old repertoire with a melody line. Buy it if the player reads standard notation. Skip it if they do not: no tablature, published by the publisher, and this is the single most common gifting mistake in this category.

Christmas Songs, Strum Together#ad prints melody, lyrics and chord frames for ukulele, baritone ukulele, guitar, banjo and mandolin across 88 pages. Nothing else here solves a room with mixed instruments in it. Buy it if two or three people in the house play different things. Skip it if one person plays alone, in which case you are paying for four sets of chord frames you will never read.

Fingerpicking Christmas#ad is twenty carols written as solo guitar arrangements in notes and tablature, each combining melody and harmony. Hal Leonard labels it for the intermediate-level guitarist, and that label is honest rather than defensive. Buy it if the player has a year or more behind them and owns a fingerstyle habit. Skip it if they started in September — an unplayable book is a comment on the player, which is the opposite of a gift.

What we left off, and why

Christmas Classics in the Really Easy Guitar series. This is the carols volume of the book we recommend — 22 traditional carols in chords, lyrics and basic tab, which on paper is the perfect second pick. We could not resolve a live listing for its ISBN (9781540097385) through the Creators API, and we do not ship a buy link we cannot verify. It is cited in the sources so you can find it elsewhere if the carols-with-tab combination is exactly what you need.

Christmas Carols for Easy Classical Guitar. Over twenty carols arranged for nylon-string guitar with online audio, which would have been the right pick for a classical guitar player. Same problem: the edition we could source from the publisher does not resolve to a live listing, and the listing that does resolve does not name the publisher’s edition, so we cannot say the two are the same book.

Self-published Christmas chord books. There are many, they are cheap, and several outrank the Hal Leonard titles in search. We left them off for the reason we leave off unbranded multi-packs everywhere else on this site: no publisher page, no stated level, no arranger, no page count, and no way to tell a reader what is actually inside the book.

Fake books. A hundred carols as melody-and-chord lead sheets for about twenty dollars is genuinely good value, and it is the wrong format for a beginner: no strumming guidance, tiny print, and a reading assumption that a first-year player does not have. Revisit it in a couple of years.

If the player is a pianist rather than a guitarist, the same four-way notation question applies with different answers — see Christmas piano books for beginners.