Christmas Sheet Music For Piano: 60 Easy To Intermediate Classic Christmas Hits

This book is a great collection of songs that mix together two of the world’s most beautiful things, especially for children: music and Christmas. I remember when I first touched the keys of an old piano as a kid, I just fell in love with the sounds. This book was meant as a gift to a friend of mine, her child was so adamant about learning how to play piano, and hopefully, she will hold on to that. She says this is a great book because all melodies are already familiar and they are also very short so her daughter can learn them one a day. And because of that, she can show off a lot of skillful playing in a very short time. It’s a great little book for beginners of all ages!

Great

The best thing about this book is its title. If only it could deliver! but alas, it is chock-full of errors and omissions.The contents include a broad selection of carols from around the world, mostly in English, but also some in French and German. They range from the timeless classics through modern popular music, and include both well-known and less familiar songs, with a few surprises (like Christmas lyrics set to the music of When The Saints Go Marching In.)There are quite a number of songs in poorly chosen keys that would require singers to have many years' training; they lie far above the vocal range of the ordinary amateur caroler.Many songs are listed as "traditional" when in fact they were composed quite recently, within living memory, and such information is readily available on the internet. Also, several songs have been attributed not to their authors, but instead to the artist or group that popularized them with a recording. This is poor documentation and could possibly be a breach of copyright law; besides that, it's downright rude--don't you expect to get the credit when you do a job?There are many errors in the text of lyrics. For example, in The Seven Joys of Mary, "The first good job that Mary had..."--this looks to me like the auto-correct function was allowed to run amok. Yet other typos are obvious--"nos" for "not", and "they" for "the". Also, long carols have been truncated by omitting verses and sometimes music. The Seven Joys of Mary only tells us of the first one, and The Twelve Days of Christmas ends with the three French hens. Perhaps the most annoying of all: I Saw Three Ships gives the first and second verses only, and we are left to wonder, "what was in those ships all three?"While we're wondering--O Come All Ye Faithful, Go Tell It On The Mountain, and Sing We Now of Christmas are all included, and all are given the subtitle "Here We Come A-Caroling", which is another (musically unrelated) carol that could well have been included in this collection, but it isn't. What is it doing as a subtitle to these other carols? Why mention it if you're not going to include it?As to the music, the arrangements are simple enough that each hand plays only one note most of the time, and most selections (though not all) are in keys with no more than two sharps or flats. The right hand melodies look correct enough, but sometimes the left hand part doesn't seem to be intended to go with it--there are a number of questionable passages. There are several instances of outright errors in notation, such as a direction "Dal Segno" without the required sign. Also, it seems as though the software was left in charge of laying out the notes and their spacing and the number of measures per line, so that there will be five or six measures on each line except the very last, which will contain only two, or even only one measure. This leads to difficulty in reading, and could easily have been adjusted.Faults like these are to be found on every page, often four or five or more within a piece. Because of this, I cannot recommend this book for beginners, so if you're looking for a gift for your first or second year student, pass this one by. For a more advanced player also, pass it by; there are much better works available that will not need to be decoded before playing.The saddest part is that all of these flaws could have been corrected easily with only a few hours research and the advice of two editors: one for the text and another for the music. Any writer/composer benefits from the expertise of a good editor, and the compiler of this work needs to realize that and not undertake a job that's beyond his present level of skill without enlisting the help of knowledgeable friends to guide him.I'll definitely be returning this one.

My daughter loved this book for her piano. It has a lot of great songs in it for Christmas.

Many songs don't have all the lyrics. The 12 Days of Christmas only goes up to day 3. Deck the Halls..only 1 lyric. Let it snow... only 1 lyric.I bought this to book to sing carols at a nursing home... now I have to look up the rest of the lyrics.Use fewer songs, but include all the lyrics.

It has nice easy reading for beginners but you do need to know how to read music for sure. Nice song collection.

Good selections and clear printing.I would consider myself an intermediate pianist. This songbook is perfect for me to open this book and play every note accurately and on beat with minimal practice. My other Christmas songbooks are good if I want to focus on 1 or 2 songs to get perfectly, but here I have a choice of 55 songs that still sound really nice.This book is an absolute delight!

Expensive for what it is.