Northern Assembly (Denmark) – Tag julen Tilbage (Take back Christmas) (single/future album title track)

It sounds like an order barked out by US Secretary for War Pete Hegseth but is in fact this year’s Christmas song from Northern Assembly, an indie/folk quartet from Aarhus.

It is the 10^th year in a row that the Aarhus folk orchestra has released a Christmas song – and this year they will be collected on the album ‘Take Back Christmas’, where the title track is also brand new.

I didn’t want to do Xmas just yet but this is thought-provoking and good.

It is a ‘pop activist’ call to pick up the gauntlet and fight for Christmas peace.

Because the underlying philosophy is that Christmas peace is for sale. It must be bought, wrapped and delivered before the 24^th, and somewhere in the rush, what it was all about disappears. It has become more pressure than comfort.

That’s pretty much the same philosophy that has been adopted by the makers of the famous John Lewis (department store) Christmas TV adverts in the UK in recent years; the one that just about everyone in the country looks forward to.

Once revered for their heartbreaking storylines (such as a lonely old man on the Moon spied through a telescope by a little girl from her bedroom window who sends him a Christmas present tied to balloons, set to the Oasis song ‘Half the World Away’ sung by Aurora, the standard has slipped badly latterly but was retrieved last year with a tale of an emotional bond forming between a withdrawn teenager and his father by the simple act of sending him a small, understated but symbolic present.

And that is the message in this song, Tag julen Tilbage, that the real meaning of Christmas has long been lost in the hype, amongst the hustle and bustle, the pressure, the materialism, the expectations and the underlying global unrest that both precedes it and accompanies it. Not a new idea but one worth repeating.

Having said that, I had to smile at the opening lines, which I misread as “Christmas 1988 was the first for Karen alone. She sat in the chair and toasted herself.” Well those three-bar electric fires can get hot, can’t they? The actual line is “toasted to herself”.

It is Northern Assembly’s most pop-oriented effort to date with jangly instrumentalism, a simple underlying piano melody and a catchy chorus in which Dina Dánialsdóttir demands that everyone makes Christmas “their own.”

Peace & Love, man.

On the album, the song has an English counterpart, which is also the title track. Where the Danish single dances to a pop beat, the title track lifts towards gospel.

The album is the culmination of 10 years of work on Christmas songs. Since 2017, Northern Assembly has released one Christmas song a year, the very first recorded in an attic in Aarhus with a single microphone. Now, all 20 songs are collected for the first time, plus the title track, and the band’s journey unfolds in a book with the stories behind each song.

The album ‘Take Back Christmas’ will be released on November 20^th, 2026.

Northern Assembly is built around songwriters Dina Dánialsdóttir -who has roots in the Faroe Islands (vocals) and Andreas Bevan (guitar) and with Jesper Smalbro (double bass) and Jens Hedegaard (drums).

Find them on:

Website: https://www.northernassembly.com/