"Fantasia on Christmas Carols" was first performed at the 1912 "Three Choirs Festival" at Hereford Cathedral.

The Fantasia is a single movement work which consists of the English folk carols "The truth sent from above", "Come all you worthy gentlemen" and "On Christmas night all Christians sing", all folk songs collected in southern England by Vaughan Williams and his friend Cecil Sharp a few years earlier. These carols are interposed with brief orchestral quotations from other carols, such a...