Best Christmas songbooks for ukulele

If the ukulele arrived this autumn, buy 3-Chord Christmas Carols for Ukulele — thirty carols arranged so the whole book needs three chords, for about fifteen dollars. If the player is past that, buy First 50 Christmas Songs You Should Play on Ukulele, which has fifty songs with melody, lyrics and chord diagrams and covers both the carols and the radio canon. Those two answer most of this page, and the rest of it is about the situations they do not fit.

We have not played from these books. What we have done is read every publisher’s own product page — song counts, page counts, trim size, arranger and arrangement style all come from Hal Leonard directly and are cited at the bottom. That matters here more than usual, because the listings for Christmas ukulele books are keyword-stuffed to the point of being misleading: two of the seven are advertised with a format the publisher does not claim. Our method is published in full, including what would get a pick dropped.

Chord count is the spec. Song count is marketing.

Every Christmas ukulele book advertises a number on its cover and it is almost always the wrong number. Fifty songs, a hundred carols, two hundred and fifty favorites: none of that tells you whether the person opening the book can play any of them.

The number that does is how many chords the arrangements use, and the ukulele is the one instrument where this question has a clean answer. A beginner who has had a ukulele for a month usually owns C, F, G7 and A minor. In the right keys, that covers Jingle Bells, Silent Night, Away in a Manger, Deck the Hall and a dozen other carols outright.

Which is exactly what 3-Chord Christmas Carols for Ukulele#ad is: Hal Leonard publishes it as 30 songs of the season in three-chord arrangements, 48 pages. It is the only book in this category that states its chord load up front, and for a first-year player it is the difference between a book that gets played in December and a book that gets shelved in January.

The trade is real and worth saying: three-chord arrangements simplify harmony. A carol that normally moves through four or five chords loses one, and a player with a good ear will notice. That is a smaller problem than a book they cannot play.

Carols and Christmas songs are different books

The second thing that goes wrong is repertoire, and publishers do not help: “100 Christmas Carols” and “First 50 Christmas Songs” sit next to each other on a shelf looking like the same product.

Carols are traditional and mostly out of copyright — The First Noel, O Come All Ye Faithful, Good King Wenceslas, Coventry Carol. That is what a family sings around a table, and it is what the 100-carol book#ad is full of.

Christmas songs are the twentieth-century pop canon — Blue Christmas, Winter Wonderland, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and on a ukulele page it is worth naming Mele Kalikimaka, which is the song somebody will request the second they see the instrument. That is First 50#ad, and it is the only pick here that covers both halves properly.

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

The ukulele-specific part: keys, and who is singing

Here is a thing that is particular to this instrument. A ukulele is almost always accompanying a voice — usually the player’s, often a room’s — and Christmas music is published in keys chosen for choirs and pianos rather than for either a ukulele’s easy shapes or an untrained singer’s range.

The same carol in the wrong key turns three open chords into two barre chords, and puts the melody somewhere a room full of relatives cannot reach. Transposing on the fly is a skill a beginner does not have.

That is the argument for The Daily Ukulele: Christmas Edition#ad. Hal Leonard describes Jim Beloff’s arrangements as being in uke-friendly keys, with melody, lyrics and chord grids, and the book carries a built-in Ukulele 101 section and chord chart so somebody can be handed it cold. Thirty-one songs in 48 pages is a small collection by the standards of this page, and for the situation it targets — a group singing — it is the right one.

Strumming, or playing the whole song?

The last fork is what “playing a Christmas song” means to the person receiving the book.

Most of these books assume strumming: chord diagrams over lyrics, with a melody line printed for reference. One person strums, everybody sings, and it sounds like Christmas.

Chord-melody is the other thing — melody and chord played together so one ukulele sounds like the finished song with nobody singing. Christmas Songs for Solo Fingerstyle Ukulele#ad is Fred Sokolow’s book for that, and its structure is unusually honest: each of the 25 songs appears twice, once as a solo fingerstyle arrangement with tab and chord diagrams and once as a plain lyric-and-chord lead sheet. So the book is useful the week it arrives and still useful a year later.

If you do not know which of the two the player wants, buy the strumming book. Chord-melody is a technique people choose deliberately, and a beginner who was given a book full of it reads the gift as a comment on their playing.

The picks

3-Chord Christmas Carols for Ukulele#ad is the one to buy for a new player: 30 carols across three chords in 48 pages, including Angels We Have Heard on High, Deck the Hall, The First Noel, Jingle Bells, Joy to the World and Silent Night. Buy it if the player learned their first chords this autumn. Skip it if they want modern Christmas songs, or if they are already comfortable with seventh chords, because they will be past this in an afternoon. Stock was in single figures when we checked, so this is a now purchase rather than a December 20 one.

First 50 Christmas Songs You Should Play on Ukulele#ad is the best single book here. Hal Leonard publishes it as 50 Christmas favorites in melody, lyrics and chord diagrams across 98 pages, and the list runs from Silent Night to Blue Christmas to Mele Kalikimaka. The printed melody matters: it means a player can pick out the tune as well as strum behind a singer. Buy it if the player can change chords at tempo. Skip it if they are two weeks in, where the three-chord book is kinder. One honest note: at 9 by 12 inches and 98 pages this does not live in a case pocket.

The Daily Ukulele: Christmas Edition#ad is the sing-along pick, covered above: 31 songs, Beloff arrangements in uke-friendly keys, melody with lyrics and chord grids, and a Ukulele 101 section. Buy it if the ukulele is going to be the instrument at a family gathering. Skip it if the player wants either a complete carol book or a complete pop book — this is deliberately a mix, and a short one.

100 Christmas Carols for Ukulele#ad is 144 pages of traditional repertoire and the deepest carol list on this page, including The Boar’s Head Carol, Coventry Carol, Pat-A-Pan, Masters in This Hall and Rise Up Shepherd and Follow. It is also the cheapest book here per song. Buy it if the ukulele is going caroling, to a church service or to a school event. Skip it if the player is a teenager who learned the instrument from videos. Across a hundred carols the difficulty varies, so a first-year player will find some beyond them — which is the price of a collection this deep.

Christmas Songs — Strum Together#ad is the one book here that solves a room rather than a player: 88 pages with melody, lyrics and chord frames for ukulele, baritone ukulele, guitar, banjo and mandolin at once. Buy it if two or three people in the house play different instruments, or if the player is on a baritone ukulele, where most books print the wrong chord shapes. Skip it if one person plays alone, in which case you are paying for four other instruments’ chord frames. It is also a pick on our Christmas guitar songbooks page, for the same reason from the other side.

Christmas Songs for Solo Fingerstyle Ukulele#ad is the chord-melody book, 25 songs printed two ways across 96 pages, arranged by Fred Sokolow with notes on the songs and their composers. Buy it if the player is in their second year or has asked what chord-melody is. Skip it if they started in September. It is the dearest single-instrument book on the page, and the reason is that you are getting two arrangements of everything.

The Christmas Ukulele Fake Book#ad is 250-plus songs in 416 pages at 5.5 by 8.5 inches — the pocket trim is the feature, because it is the only book here you can take to a room without choosing what to bring. Buy it if the player takes requests. Skip it if they are a beginner: fake-book notation is small, dense and assumes you can build an arrangement from a melody line and a chord symbol. Stock was in single figures at the time of writing, and the publisher list price is well above what it currently sells for — which is why the price on this page comes from the live layer rather than from the cover.

What we left off, and why

100 Most Beautiful Christmas Songs for ukulele (HL 00295231). A hundred sacred and secular arrangements in 226 pages, in stock, and a genuinely good book. It is off the list because it sits between two picks that each do its job better: the 100-carol book is deeper on traditional repertoire for less money, and First 50 is the better mixed collection for a beginner. If you specifically want sacred and pop in one large volume, it is cited in the sources and it is the book.

Jumpin’ Jim’s Ukulele Christmas and Jumpin’ Jim’s Happy Holidays. Jim Beloff’s Flea Market Music titles are the ukulele world’s standard songbooks and autocomplete shows people search for them by name. Both were down to single-figure stock when we checked — two copies and seven copies respectively — which is not something to send a reader at in the second week of November. The Beloff arranging is represented here by the Daily Ukulele Christmas Edition, which is in stock.

Self-published Christmas ukulele PDFs and tab books. Several are cheap and some are fine. They are off for the reason we leave off unbranded multi-packs everywhere on this site: no publisher page, no stated arrangement style, no page count, and no way to tell a reader what is actually inside before they buy it.

Christmas sheet music for solo ukulele in standard notation only. It exists, it is cheap, and it is the wrong format for this audience: most ukulele players read chord diagrams and tab, not the treble staff. Every pick on this page uses at least one of the two.

A ukulele as the gift itself. Different question, and we answer it elsewhere: start at best beginner ukuleles, or at gifts for ukulele players if the player already owns one. If the instrument is new this month, it will also need a tuner — new nylon strings stretch for days and a December ukulele goes out of tune between carols.

Playing a different instrument this Christmas? The same four-way format question has different answers on guitar and piano.