Want to play some Christmas songs on your ukulele this year? Just unwrapped your very first uke and haven’t got a clue where to start? Look no further. Christmas is honestly the best possible excuse to pick up a ukulele. Everybody already knows the words, nobody is judging your timing and half the room will sing along whether you invite them to or not.

There’s one problem though. Most “easy Christmas songs” lists are a bit too optimistic about what counts as easy. They’ll happily hand a complete beginner “Mele Kalikimaka”, because surely the Hawaiian one is the ukulele one, when it actually needs fourteen different chords. Or “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, which sits in a flat key stuffed with barre shapes. That’s not a great first evening.

So I sat down and counted them properly. Every song below is ordered by how many different chords you actually have to learn, taken straight off its own sheet here on UkuTabs. Ten songs, easiest first, with not a single barre chord in the lot. Each one links to the full sheet with lyrics, a transposer and auto-scroll.

How many chords do you need to play Christmas songs on ukulele?

Three or four, for most of them. Don’t panic. The carols were written to be sung by ordinary people standing around in cold churches and doorways, so they tend to sit on a handful of chords and stay put.

First things first: learn these eight shapes and you can play nearly everything below, plus most of the extras further down.

If you want the absolute rock bottom easiest thing on the whole site, that’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, which is just two chords from start to finish. It’s not the most requested carol in the world, which is why it isn’t in the ten below, but it’s a lovely place to start if you only picked the ukulele up yesterday.

New to reading those little grids? Have a look at my guide on reading ukulele chord diagrams first, it takes about five minutes. And get yourself in tune with the online tuner before you start, because nothing kills the Christmas mood like a flat G string.

1. “Silent Night”

Three chords and probably the most requested carol there is. It was written in 1818 in a tiny Austrian village and it’s now sung in a few hundred languages. The lovely thing about it for a beginner is the tempo: it’s slow, so you get real thinking time between C, F and G7. If you only learn one song off this list before the family shows up, make it this one.

Main chords in this song: C – F – G7

Lyrics and ukulele tabs: Silent Night

2. “Angels We Have Heard on High”

Three chords and it sounds far grander than it has any right to. That big “Glo-o-o-oria” run everyone waits for happens entirely over one chord, so you get to sit still and let the singers do all the work. Gm is the only slightly unusual shape here and it’s a three-finger grip, not a barre, so don’t let it put you off.

Main chords in this song: C – F – Gm

Lyrics and ukulele tabs: Angels We Have Heard on High

3. “O Christmas Tree”

Three chords again and one of them is Dm, which is a shape you’ll want in your hands anyway. The German original, “O Tannenbaum”, is older than the Christmas tree tradition it now belongs to. It’s a waltz (= three beats in a bar instead of four), so count it in threes and let the chords ring out rather than strumming it into the ground.

Main chords in this song: C – Dm – G7

Lyrics and ukulele tabs: O Christmas Tree

4. “Feliz Navidad” by José Feliciano

Four chords, written by José Feliciano in 1970 and quite possibly the best joy-per-chord ratio in all of Christmas music. The Spanish half is six words long and then it repeats, so nobody in the room gets to claim they don’t know it. In my opinion this is the one to have ready for the moment the party goes a bit quiet.

Main chords in this song: C – D – Em – G

Lyrics and ukulele tabs: Feliz Navidad

5. “Last Christmas” by Wham!

Four chords and here’s the happy surprise of the whole list. One of the most-searched Christmas songs on the planet is genuinely easy on ukulele. Am, C, Dm and G, going round and round for the entire song. George Michael wrote it and recorded the whole thing himself back in 1984. If you want one modern crowd-pleaser in your back pocket this is by far the cheapest one to buy.

Main chords in this song: Am – C – Dm – G

Lyrics and ukulele tabs: Last Christmas

6. “Joy to the World”

Four chords and the most-published Christmas hymn in North America. Isaac Watts wrote the words back in 1719, based on Psalm 98. The melody walks straight down the scale at the start, which makes it one of the nicest carols to try picking out note by note once the chords feel comfortable. A natural next step, that one.

Main chords in this song: C – F – G – G7

Lyrics and ukulele tabs: Joy to the World

7. “Away in a Manger”

Four chords and the gentlest song on the list. It’s the one most people learned as a child, which means the tune is already rattling around somewhere in your head and that makes the chord changes much easier to feel coming. It’s also a lovely candidate for fingerpicking if you fancy something softer than a strum.

Main chords in this song: Am – C – D – G

Lyrics and ukulele tabs: Away in a Manger

8. “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby

Five chords and that fifth shape is worth it. Irving Berlin wrote it in 1942 and Crosby’s recording went on to sell more copies than any other single ever released. It’s slow and full of space, which is exactly what you want while you’re still thinking about where your fingers go next.

Main chords in this song: Am – C – D – D7 – G

Lyrics and ukulele tabs: White Christmas

9. “Jingle Bells”

The most requested Christmas song of the lot and it isn’t quite as simple as everyone assumes, so let me be straight with you. The verse needs G, C, Am, D7 and D. The chorus, the bit everybody actually sings, only needs four: G, C, A7 and D7. So you can learn the chorus tonight, play it while the room joins in and pick up the verse whenever you feel like it. Six chords all in, none of them a barre. But you can do it!

Main chords in this song: G – C – Am – D – D7 – A7

Lyrics and ukulele tabs: Jingle Bells

10. “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”

Six chords, so it closes out the list, but every one of them is a shape you’ll have met by now. This is the carol you need for the doorstep, since it’s short, everybody knows it and it ends the evening on the right note. Worth learning purely so you’ve got something to finish on.

Main chords in this song: C – D – Em – G – A7 – B7

Lyrics and ukulele tabs: We Wish You a Merry Christmas

More easy Christmas songs to play

Ten was never going to get you through a whole December. These are all four or five chords with no barre either, so they slot straight in once the list above starts feeling easy. Some are less famous than the ten, which is exactly why they’re worth having: everybody plays “Jingle Bells”, far fewer people can pull out “The Holly and the Ivy”.

Which famous Christmas songs are harder than they sound?

Here’s the bit most lists leave out and it’s the reason a lot of beginners quietly give up around the second week of December. The carols are easy. The famous recordings mostly aren’t, because they came out of jazz and big band arranging, where the chords keep moving and a good few of them are sevenths and diminished shapes.

Counted off the sheets here, this is what you’re really taking on:

None of that means avoid them, so don’t be put off. It just means give them a couple of weeks rather than one evening. There’s also an easier arrangement of Mele Kalikimaka on the site that trims it down to nine chords and every sheet has the transposer if a key is fighting you.

What key should you play in when everyone’s singing along?

Whatever’s comfortable for the singers, not for you. This matters more at Christmas than at any other time of year, because you end up accompanying people who never normally sing and whose range is a lot narrower than they think it is.

C and G are the safest keys for a mixed group of adults and kids, which is lucky, since that’s where most of the songs above already live. If a carol feels like it’s straining at the top, drop it a step or two with the transposer on the song page instead of making everyone reach for it. “O Holy Night” is the classic offender here and it’s worth pitching low on purpose.

One more trick. If the shapes in a song are awkward but the key is right for the room, a capo lets you keep the easy shapes and shift the pitch instead. My guide to using a capo on ukulele covers where to put it and when it’s actually worth the bother.

Where can you get all of these on paper?

Playing off a phone works fine right up until somebody else wants to see the words, or your screen dims halfway through the second verse. We’ve all been there.

So I made a book. Jingle Strums is a ukulele Christmas songbook with forty carols and songs plus four lesser known ones, each printed with every verse in full, the chords marked exactly where they change and the melody in both notation and tab on the facing page. It opens with a short course, so somebody who has never held a ukulele can start on page one and be playing by Christmas Eve. Easier songs sit near the front and the first full barre chord doesn’t turn up until song ten. There’s a caroling section at the back too, just the words, printed big enough to put on the table when everyone else wants to sing.

It’s coming as a PDF and as a paperback, in time for Christmas. Every song in it also has a free page here with the same chords and the same words, so the book and the site never disagree with each other.

Frequently asked questions

Learn two or three of these before the middle of December and you’ll have something ready for the moment somebody hands you the ukulele and asks. Good luck and have fun! Feel free to contact me whenever you need more information about playing Christmas songs on ukulele. If you think I’ve put one of these in the wrong order I’d genuinely like to hear about it. Once the tree comes down, the easy ukulele songs collection will keep you going into January.