It was Christmas Eve in Oberndorf, Austria, in 1818. Joseph Mohr, the vicar of the church, had written a new song for the Christmas Eve service and the organist Franz Gruber had set it to music. But the organ in the village church broke down. So Gruber accompanied Mohr with the guitar in the first-ever rendition of "Silent Night."

The story doesn't end there, however. When Karl Mauracher, a master organ builder and repairman from the Ziller Valley, traveled to Oberndorf to work on the organ, Gruber tested it by playing the new song. The repairman liked the song so much that he took a copy of it back to his own village. There, four daughters of a village glovemaker learned the song and began singing it in concerts all over the region.

Little did they realize that night that because of a faulty organ this new Christmas song about the birth of the Christchild would bless people all over the world and be sung in hundreds of different languages during the Christmas season.