There’s a perennial debate that arises at the end of every year when December and the beginning of Advent roll around. It’s one that leaves all of the people who have started humming carols under their breath feeling a little guilty. When is too early to start playing Joy to the World, and is streaming The Manhattan Transfer’s The Christmas Album on Dec. 1 a bit premature? (READ MORE: National Cathedral Slammed for Charging Fees for Christmas Liturgies)

The difficult answer to the latter question is yes. Most of Advent is too early to start listening to Christmas carols. Getting the Christmas feels is all well and good — but not when you’re still weeks out from the actual event. Before you sign off on listening to music altogether (or rebelliously close this article and press play on your Spotify Christmas playlist), you should know that there’s a whole forgotten genre of music intended just for these days of preparation. So, here are just a few suggestions to help you bide the time until Dec. 25.

O Come, O Come Emmanuel

It would be impossible to write a comprehensive list of Advent carols unless it began with the classic O Come, O Come Emmanuel. It is one of the few carols that has retained its popularity even in our modern secular world. Perhaps the reason is that its melody is so hauntingly beautiful. Or maybe it’s because so many of us grew up singing it before dinner while lighting the Advent wreath — one of the few universally practiced family liturgies left. (READ MORE from Aubrey Gulick: You’re Decorating for Christmas Wrong)

O Come, O Come Emmanuel is one of those hymns that grows out of ancient ecclesiastical liturgies. It’s an English rendition of a Latin hymn based on the O Antiphons, a series of hymns tacked on to the end of the Catholic Church’s evening prayer during the final days leading up to Christmas. Somehow, during the centuries that it evolved into the hymn we know, the antiphons were mixed out of order — Veni Veni Emmanuel is the seventh O Antiphon, not the first.

The hymn wasn’t translated into English until the 1850s, when John McNeele published his Mediæval Hymns and Sequences, translating the well-known Latin hymn as “draw nigh, draw nigh, Emmanuel” (not quite as catchy) just in time for Thomas Helmore to set the Latin text to the tune we are all familiar with, as the original O Antiphons were far more ornate. Since then, the hymn has been adopted both in its original Latin and its more popular English form as the Advent carol and has almost as many renditions as there are modern musicians.

Comfort, Comfort Ye My People

Unlike its more popular Advent cousin, Comfort, Comfort Ye My People might be mistaken as a Christmas song. Yet it consists of Isaiah’s heartfelt prayer for a Messiah. (READ MORE: Silence and the Impossibility of Martyrdom)

The hymn was originally set in German by Johann Olearius in the 17th century, but it didn’t find its way into the English hymn tradition for another 200 years — despite George Handel’s setting of a similar text in his popular oratorio, Messiah. Olearius was not necessarily a lyricist. He was raised in a family of Lutheran theologians and was better known for his commentary on the bible and his translation of Thomas á Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. But, in an age when Lutheran theologians were setting biblical texts and traditional chants into German for their congregations, Comfort, Comfort Ye My People stuck and was eventually translated into English — which is how most of us know it.

Savior of the Nations, Come

If J.S. Bach had a favorite Advent carol, it was likely this one, which he knew as Nun Komm Der Heiden Heiland. He composed a plethora of organ chorales and choral works to this tune for the Advent season. His frequent settings of this tune makes a lot of sense considering that Martin Luther is frequently credited with adapting the text from St. Ambrose’s Veni Redemptor Omnium, a chant hymn sometimes sung during either Christmas or Advent.

Savior of the Nations, Come walks the line between being a Christmas and an Advent carol. It speaks of the birth of Christ in the past tense, but nonetheless invokes the coming of Christ in a manner that echoes the adventus sentiment of the season.

Savior of the nations, come;
virgin’s Son, make here Thy home!
Marvel now, O heav’n and earth,
that the Lord chose such a birth.

The first verse captures the dichotomy of a Savior who has come, and is also preparing to come — something that many harmonizations of the hymn also pick up on by using alternating minor and major chords to capture the grand mystery of this season.

Adam Lay Ybounden

As indicated by its title, Adam Lay Ybounden is an old English Advent carol — old enough that we don’t know who wrote the lyrics — and it is frequently set to a melody composed by Boris Ord, a British organist from Cambridge. The hymn retells the story of the fall of man from Genesis 3, but despite its tragic subject, it ends hopefully:

Blessed be the time

That apple taken was!

Therefore we may singen

Deo Gratias!

The hymn was rediscovered and printed by Thomas Wright in the mid 1830s, and he speculated that it had likely been used in the mystery plays that parishes had held during the Middle Ages in an effort to educate children on tenets of the faith — a theory that makes sense considering that many of the mystery plays were retellings of salvation history.

O Radiant Dawn

O Radiant Dawn is not a congregational hymn, but James MacMillan’s glorious arrangement of it has nevertheless made its way to choir lofts and concert stages around the world. Like O Come, O Come Emmanuel, the text comes from the O Antiphons and compares the Christ-child, the lumen mundi, to the sun rising over the earth and dispelling the “shadow of darkness.” The text concludes with an aptly selected passage from Isaiah:

The people who walked in darkness have seen the great light

upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone. Amen.

This Advent carol captures the sentiment of longing that defines this season of preparation. After singing songs like these for four weeks, indulging ourselves with carols like Joy to the World feels that much sweeter on Christmas day.