Best Christmas piano books for beginners

Buy Christmas Songs in the Super Easy Songbook series for about eighteen dollars — sixty songs with the letter name printed inside every note head, a one-line right-hand melody, chord diagrams for the left hand, and no page turns. That is the right answer for the adult beginner who makes up most of the people buying a Christmas piano book in November. It is the wrong answer for a child in lessons, and the rest of this page is about why.

Levels, song counts, page counts and arrangement style here all come from the publishers’ own product pages, fetched and cited at the bottom. We have not played from these books. We have read what Hal Leonard, Willis and Faber say is inside them, which turns out to be the part gift-givers get wrong.

The four ways a Christmas piano book is printed

Letter notes. The letter name is printed inside each note head and the left hand plays chord shapes from a diagram. Needs: nothing. Gets a carol out of the piano the first evening. Hal Leonard calls this the Super Easy Songbook series and says it is for “an absolute beginner or returning to the keyboard after some time away”.

Big note. Real standard notation, enlarged. Needs: the ability to read the staff slowly. Transfers to everything else the player will ever read, which letter notes do not.

Easy piano. Standard notation, two hands, simplified harmony. Needs: roughly a year of reading. This is where most adult learners think they are and are not.

Method-correlated. Written to the exact level of a specific method book — Faber’s Primer, John Thompson’s First Grade. Needs: that the student is in that method. This is the format that gets played rather than shelved, and almost nobody buys it because it has seven pieces in it rather than sixty.

Why sixty songs is the wrong thing to shop for

The instinct in a shop is to compare song counts, because that is the number printed on the cover. It is the least useful number on the cover.

A book at the wrong level has an effective song count of zero. Faber’s Primer Level Christmas Book#ad has seven pieces in sixteen pages and a child in Piano Adventures Primer can play all seven in December. A 152-page Easy Piano collection has fifty songs and that same child can play none of them. The seven-piece book is the better gift by a wide margin, and it costs a third as much.

This cuts the other way too. An adult who already reads both hands will find the letter-note book patronizing within a week, and First 50 Christmas Songs#ad is the right purchase for them — fifty songs, 152 pages, and the cheapest book on this page per song.

The picks

Christmas Songs, Super Easy Songbook#ad is the default. Sixty holiday favorites across 122 pages, with Hal Leonard’s own description of the series: simple right-hand melody, letter names inside each note, basic left-hand chord diagrams, and no page turns. The song list spans the carols and the radio canon, from Silent Night to All I Want for Christmas Is You. Buy it if the player is an adult beginner, a returning player, or anybody who wants music out of the instrument this week. Skip it if a teacher is involved, because letter notes cut across what that teacher is building.

Christmas Songs with 3 Chords#ad is the same format with the left hand reduced to three chords across thirty songs, mostly traditional carols. It is five dollars cheaper and much less intimidating to open. Buy it if the piano arrived this autumn. Skip it if the player has a year behind them — they will be past it before New Year.

Piano Adventures Christmas Book, Primer Level#ad is seven pieces in sixteen pages, written to the level of the Faber Primer that a very large share of US piano teachers use, and it is the cheapest item here by a distance. Faber publishes the contents down to the teaching point — the first piece is a step-and-skip review. Buy it if the teacher uses Piano Adventures. Skip it if they use Alfred, Bastien or anything else: ask first, because the whole value is the level match.

Best Christmas Music, Big-Note Piano#ad is 62 songs in 168 pages of enlarged standard notation with lyrics, at late-elementary level. It is the obvious answer for a grandparent and a grandchild reading from the same book, which is a real December situation and one nothing else here serves. Buy it if small print is the obstacle. Skip it if the player cannot read the staff at all, because big-note still asks them to.

First 50 Christmas Songs You Should Play on the Piano#ad is fifty pop Christmas classics in Hal Leonard Easy Piano arrangements over 152 pages, and it is both the most music and the lowest price per song on this page. Buy it if the player reads two staves. Skip it if they are still on letter notes — buying up a level is not generosity, it is a book that stays shut.

Christmas Piano Solos, First Grade#ad is ten graded arrangements by Carolyn Miller, published at early-to-mid-elementary level for John Thompson’s Modern Course. These are proper short solos rather than melody lines, which is what a child wants when relatives ask them to play something. Buy it if the student is about a year into lessons. Skip it if they started in September. Check the grade carefully: the Second and Third Grade books look identical in a listing.

First 50 Christmas Carols You Should Play on the Piano#ad is the traditional half of the same series, 96 pages, Easy Piano. If the player accompanies singing — at a service, at a school event, at a table of relatives — this is the correct one of the two First 50 books. Buy it if carols are what gets requested. Skip it if the player wanted the radio songs.

What we left off, and why

Alfred’s Basic Piano Library Merry Christmas books. These are the direct equivalent of the Faber pick for students in Alfred’s method, they are in stock, and they are about nine dollars. We left them unpinned because alfred.com would not serve us a product page to a plain fetch, and every claim on this page about what is inside a book is cited to the publisher. If the teacher uses Alfred, buy the Alfred Christmas book at the level the student is on — we simply are not going to describe its contents from a retailer listing.

Fake books and the 100-song collections. Excellent value per song, wrong format for this reader: lead-sheet notation, small print, and an assumption that you can voice your own left hand. That is a skill from year three, not year one.

Piano/vocal/guitar editions. The standard three-stave popular-music format, and the one most likely to be bought by mistake because the covers say “piano”. A beginner cannot read three staves, and the piano part in these editions is written to support a singer rather than to stand alone.

Duet books. There are good Christmas duet collections at primer level and they are a genuinely lovely gift — for two people who both play. For one player they are half a book.

If what the household actually needs is the instrument rather than the music, start at beginner digital pianos or, for a sub-$100 budget, beginner instruments under $100.