O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, your leaves are unchanging and true — which is a lovely sentiment until you realise it's basically the song bragging that it's evergreen while every other plant in the room quietly panics about December. This carol has been guilt-tripping deciduous trees since the 1800s, and honestly? Deserved.
This little clip is a MelodyChords take on it: the melody and its harmony crammed onto one guitar, so you get the tune AND the chords at the same time and don't have to phone a friend. There's a free PDF if you want the notation, and it's an easygoing, festive thing to play alone by the fire while nobody watches you mouth the lyrics.
How this MelodyChords arrangement works
O Christmas Tree is a waltz — three beats to a bar — and the melody keeps leaping upward on the pickup, which is why it always sounds like it's standing up a little taller than the last line. Harmonically it's mostly a cosy I–V–I, but the tune has one sneaky trick up its sleeve: right around "how lovely are your branches" it slips in a secondary dominant, a chord borrowed from a neighbouring key to give the phrase an extra lift before it settles home. That one borrowed chord is the whole reason the carol feels warm instead of flat. In a MelodyChords arrangement, the trick is to keep the melody on top — always the highest note your ear can grab — while the chord tones fill in underneath, so one guitar covers what would normally take a whole living room of singers.
Practical takeaway: play the melody notes slightly louder than the chord underneath. Lean your thumb or picking finger into the top voice and let the rest sit back. That single dynamic trick is what makes any chord-melody piece sound like a melody with backing, rather than a mush of notes all shouting at once.
If you enjoy stuffing entire carols onto six strings, I do this to unsuspecting songs all year — We Wish You A Merry Christmas and Jingle Bells got the same treatment. Grab the free PDF, and if you'd like the Guitar Pro files and original videos, they live over on my Patreon, guarding them like a very loyal, very evergreen tree.