Tim van Eyken sang On Christmas Day It Happened So on Waterson:Carthy’s 2006 album Holy Heathens and the Old Green Man. Martin Carthy commented in the album’s sleeve notes,
Songs don’t come much darker or more forbidding than On Christmas Day It Happened So which Tim learned from Fred Hamer’s book Garners Gay. Fred Hamer recorded it from the Gipsy singer May Bradley whose mother, Ester Smith, had sung for Ella Mary Leather and Vaughan Williams fifty years before and whose version of the song Mrs Bradley had remembered almost exactly. Its steely, utterly opaque and unforgiving vision of Christianity will leave many bewildered but it’s one which still obtains in surprising places.la la la….