Christmas tunes undoubtedly make great fingerstyle arrangements, but flatpickers can get in on the yuletide festivities, too. I arranged this old favorite in the key of Em because the melody sits well in the middle of the guitar, allowing me to easily grab open E and A bass notes while the high open E and B strings ring over melody notes on the G and D strings. When arranging a tune like this, I tend to let the melody dictate where and how the accompanying arpeggios fall, filling out the melody with cross-picked chords and grabbing bass notes where I can rather than sticking to a preset picking pattern. But sometimes a traditional three-note cross-picking pattern is perfect for a particular section of the melody, as in measure 17. Notice that some of the chords appear a beat early (the B7 chords that start on beat 4 of measures 7 and 21, for example). This is dictated primarily by the melodic phrasing, but anticipating the chords also provides a nice rhythmic change.

While the arrangement is pretty straightforward, to get the strings to ring nicely in some places (particularly bars 6–7 and 16–18), you’ll need to pay attention to the fingerings, some of which are a little unusual. After playing through the melody once and reprising the intro, the melody moves up an octave (measure 27), with fewer bass notes and more melodic variations—imagine a music box and you’ll get the right vibe here. The melody then returns to the lower register (measure 39) and finishes on a nice, wintry cluster chord to send everyone scurrying off to the punch bowl.