The “Sans Day Carol”, also known as “St. Day Carol”, “The Holly Bears a Berry” and “The Holly Tree” is a traditional Cornish carol named after the Cornish village of St Day, where it was found around the turn of the twentieth century. Some sources give it as a Christmas carol, while other sources give it as a carol for the period between Passiontide and Easter The song, which is listed as no. 35 in the Oxford Book of Carols, is very closely related to the more famous carol “The Holly and the Ivy”. According to the Roud Folk Song Index, the “Sans Day Carol” and “The Holly and the Ivy” are variants of the same song. The carol and its melody were first collected and transcribed by Gilbert Hunter Doble from the singing of W.D. Watson of Penzance, Cornwall, the Borough of Penzance’s Head Gardener. Watson had learned the song in the early 1900s from a man aged around fifty or sixty years named Thomas Beard, a villager in St Day in the parish of Gwennap, Cornwall. In the early 1930s, the American folklorist James Madison Carpenter recorded W.D. Watson singing the song on wax cylinder. W.D. Watson translated the song into Cornish, which he thought had been the original language of the song, and added a fourth verse. After learning the song from W.D. Watson in English, Doble arranged the carol, altering it slightly, and publishing it in 1929. The fourth verse published by Doble is a translation of the “Ma gron war’n gelln” verse written by Watson.