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With toy instruments, sleigh bells, cracking whips and a stirring instrumental setting of the hymn “Adeste Fideles,” “Santa Claus” was an innovative, seamless single-movement narrative, in the vein of Franz Liszt’s symphonic poems.

At the boys’ annual holiday concert at Carnegie Hall, on Dec. 8, they apply their plangent sound to a grab bag of holiday-themed tunes that include “Adeste Fideles,” “Let It Snow!,”

There bad been mummers to play an exciting dramatic presentation of a story in which St. George and a Saracen and a funny Doctor did surprising things, also carol- singers who rendered “Adeste Fideles” and “I Sing of a Maiden,” in high, clear, tenor voices.

As I shaved, the joyous strains of a daughter playing “Adeste Fideles” suddenly broke through the chaos.

“First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words Adeste Fideles.