We Wish You a Merry Christmas is a popular Christmas carol written by E.D. Gritman. This lesson covers the guitar chords, sheet music for the melody including tabs, and a finger-style guitar arrangement.
Grab your guitar and let’s get started!
How to read the guitar chord charts
To clarify how to read the chord charts, the top horizontal line represents the high E string and the bottom horizontal line represents the low E string. The vertical lines separate each fret. The numbers in the blue dots tell you which fingers to use on the fretting hand.
For example, on the C Major chord, you use the:
- 1st finger on the 2nd string, 1st fret
- 2nd finger on the 4th string, 2nd fret
- 3rd finger on the 5th string, 3rd fret
- Circles represent open strings
- X means to avoid the string
If needed, you can check out this link for more on how to read guitar notation symbols.
We Wish You a Merry Christmas guitar chords
The basic guitar chords for We Wish You a Merry Christmas are C Major, F Major, D Major, G Major, E Major, and A minor. You can click on the chords with links to learn different ways of playing that chord.
Try the following chords one at a time until you feel comfortable switching between them. These chords will be written above the melody in the next section.
Here are some other resources on chords:
- What are the first chords you should learn on guitar?
- 6 tips to get better at switching between chords on guitar
- 13 ways to play an F chord on guitar.
We Wish You a Merry Christmas – melody with tabs and chords
For the sheet music below, keep in mind that the chords and melody are meant to be played as separate parts. We’ll look at how to connect these parts later in the arrangement section of this lesson.
The numbers next to some notes on the top staff indicate which fingers to use on the fretting hand.
You can refer to this simple guide to understanding music symbols if needed.
By the way, you can get all the PDFs of this song below.
We Wish You a Merry Christmas lyrics
Verse 1:
We wish you a Merry Christmas
We wish you a Merry Christmas
We wish you a Merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Chorus:
Good tidings we bring to you and your kin
Good tidings for Christmas and a Happy New Year
Verse 2:
May peace wrap its arms around you
May peace wrap its arms around you
May peace wrap its arms around you
For Christmas this year (Chorus)
Verse 3:
May your heart be filled with wonder
May your heart be filled with wonder
May your heart be filled with wonder
For Christmas this year (Chorus)
Based on : We Wish You (A Merry, Peaceful, Wonderful Christmas) by Phil Wickham. multitracks.com
We Wish You a Merry Christmas – guitar arrangement
In this section, we essentially put different parts together using a finger picking style method of playing.
You can check out this lesson to learn how to finger pick on guitar.
If you like this style of playing, you can check out this lesson to learn how to connect a melody and chords on guitar.
Get the free guitar practice guide here!
Want to learn more songs? Check out the sheet music with guitar tabs resource on this site.
All the best,
JG
