White Winter Hymnal

Pecknold wrote it at 20, sitting on a couch at his parents' house with The Simpsons on, while finishing music for the debut; he reckons it took about twenty minutes. It is a single verse sung three times as a round, in under two and a half minutes. He told the Seattle Times the band had never played it together before recording it, so the performances on the record were the first time those parts were done. Phil Ek produced it in 2007.

Pecknold has called the lyric fairly meaningless, written so the album could open with a simple jam built around singing, though in 2009 he told Mojo it grew out of watching the friends he grew up with drift away. In 2021 he told the AP that the vaguely dark words were there to cut the sweetness of the melody, that the song is definitely not about a beheading, as one internet theory holds, and that the most literal reading may be a boy falling down a hill. "That's a Christmas song at this point," he said.

It first appeared on a Sub Pop sampler in April 2008, and Bella Union released it as a single on 21 July 2008, backed with the non-album Isles. It reached 77 in Britain and four on the UK indie chart. Pitchfork ranked it the second-best track of 2008, and Time's Josh Tyrangiel put it fifth among the year's songs. Sean Pecknold, Robin's brother, directed the stop-motion video, in which a clay figure turns the seasons on a wheel; he said he had no idea whether it was any good.

Live

First played at Bumbershoot in Seattle on 3 September 2007, it is the band's most-performed song, logged 417 times on setlist.fm. Pecknold once named it his favorite to play live, while admitting the vague words can make it hard to sing. It opened their World Cafe session at Avatar Studios in New York and was played on Later... with Jools Holland that November, and in Orlando in 2023 the band brought a fan onstage to play guitar on it.

Afterlife

Pentatonix's 2014 a cappella version carried the song into school and church choirs, and by 2021 their recording and the band's had passed 180 million Spotify plays between them, with a spike every Christmas Eve. Birdy, Kina Grannis, Kim Wilde and Alexander Armstrong have also recorded it, and Phish sang it a cappella at Madison Square Garden in 2017. Pecknold said choirs singing it charm him. It plays over the opening credits of Hulu's The Path. Both uploads in the hypersongs web are the same 2007 studio recording: one is Sean Pecknold's official video, the other the track as licensed to Acoustic, a 2016 [PIAS] compilation.