Kate Rusby on Carols and Christmas in Yorkshire

Rusby has recorded, in the very unfestive month of June, - "We did have a tiny little tree in the studio," she says - an album of Christmas songs. This Sunday coming -her birthday in fact - she arrives in Glasgow to perform songs from said album, While Mortals Sleep, and any other Christmas songs that take her fancy. The day after, she does the same in Edinburgh. But today, a Friday, she's driven from her home in a village on the edge of Barnsley into York to meet me and talk about Christmas, Yorkshire (and Christmas and Yorkshire), family and the state of folk music in general. In the process she drinks tea, laughs a lot and paints a picture of someone who temperamentally is as far removed from the mood of the songs she normally sings - all those old, dark ballads about broken people - as is possible.

In fact While Mortals Sleep, (her second Christmas album) is itself, I point out, rather more upbeat than her usual fare. "Yeah, what's going on?" she giggles. "Perhaps that's why I like doing it. Because it's the one time of year I'm not singing about deaths and all that."

If you want a word to describe Rusby you could do worse than steal the one she uses to sum up her idea of Christmas - "twinkliness". Her dark, curly hair is salted by blonde strands that curl like festive ribbons, her cheeks have a pinch of natural red in them and she looks much younger than her age - 37, almost 38. It's difficult to believe that next year she will celebrate 20 years of performing.

The new album - and its predecessor Sweet Bells - draw on a particularly south Yorkshire tradition of carols being sung in pubs that she doesn't think happens anywhere in the country. "They got thrown out of church by the Victorians for being too raucous and happy," Rusby explains, "so they ended up in pubs with the beer and the wine and the high spirits. And it's continued like that. It starts the Sunday after Armistice and it carries on every weekend up until New Year's Day.

"It's only in certain pubs, usually in pubs in the middle of nowhere, and a lot of people don't even know about it. People just turn up at 12 o'clock, earlier if you know anything about it because you'll not get a space in the room. And there's even positions for people who have been going for years and years who will stand next to the organist and you don't get in that space unless you're that person because you'll get shoved out. There's usually an organist and in some places there's a brass quintet and everybody sings these carols for about two hours, two and a half hours, and then everyone finishes and goes home."

It was a tradition that Rusby herself grew up with. "We were taken along as children. We would sit in the tap room with colouring books and pens, pop and crisps and be soaking in all these carols and singing along. So by the time we were teenagers we had learnt them all by osmosis."

It's in these Sunday afternoons in the pub that she first heard While Shepherds Watched Their Flock By Night sung to the tune of Ilkley Moor Bar T'at, a version of which features on the album. It is mixed in with simply-spun versions of Kris Kringle, Joy To The World and Shepherds Arise. During one of her Christmas gigs a man walked out halfway demanding his money back because "it was all about Jesus". "It was the first time I ever thought 'yeah there is a lot of that'. But we also do a song about a man who turns into a dog.'"

Is she religious? She is, she says, but not a regular churchgoer. "I live right next door to a church and we hardly ever go. But we got married in the church, I was baptised in the church and if you ask me, I'm a Christian. But I don't go very often at all."

She shares a house with Damien O'Kane, her husband, and their two-year-daughter Daisy. There's another kid on the way next year, she tells me, not that you'd know it yet. Her brother Joe helped produce the album. Damien played on it. Her sister, her brother and her parents all live in the same village and Christmas Day will see them all troop from one house to another, with various stop-offs in the pub. For Rusby, family is at the heart of everything. That's how it's always been.

She first went on stage when she was 12 alongside her sister, playing fiddle in her parent's ceilidh band. "I think it was a solution to babysitting." Her brother Joe would sleep under the mixing desk. "I'm sure that's why he's ended up doing the sound." She played her first solo gig, during a festival in Holmfirth when she was 16 or 17. She vowed she'd never get on a stage again. She's rarely had any time offstage since. "We've always been a really close family and I think it's the music that's done that - or a love of the same type of music because I don't think it happens in many families where the generations adore the same music, you know."

Well indeed. Rusby remained true to folk when all her contemporaries were listening to pop. "I was into Bon Jovi at one point, but I was also listening to Tom McConville, the fiddle player, at the same time, so I was listening to all sorts of stuff and it never phased me. All my friends at school would say 'oh what's that thing you're going to this week? Oh it's a folk festival!' They were more intrigued and wanted to join in than going, 'God, you're weird'."

When she did start performing she was quickly adopted as the face of young folk, along with Eliza Carthy and, later, Cara Dillon. "It was the start of the youngsters coming through. We were the children of the people who were there in the 1960s. We were the first of the young bunch to come along. It's changed enormously since then." Well indeed. Nu folk - the stuff practised by Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling, the stuff that wins Brits these days - has moved into the mainstream. Not to everyone's pleasure. "A lot of people on the folk scene are going 'why are they selling themselves as folk when they're not'," admits Rusby. "And of course they are. It sounds folky to me."

Of course it's not just the music scene that has changed in the last two decades. Rusby has too. "I've got older and more wrinkled," she says. She's also had a life. She's been married before - to John McCusker, once of the Battlefield Band. She's grieved for family members who have died. What's striking, I suggest to her, is that you don't hear any of that in her voice. It is still this very simple, very pure instrument. She's not so sure. "On the first records I did I look back and think I sound like such a little girl. But my voice is a bit deeper for some reason. When I look back I do feel my voice has changed at various points, especially in the middle when I had a lot of trauma going on to do with home life and close members of my family dying. Of course it affects you. And when you're singing emotional songs it really affected how I sung. Listening to recordings of gigs I felt like I was struggling but it was just that I was so jammed up with emotion."

Things are easier now. In life and song. She leaves with a smile on her face to pick up Daisy from nursery. Over the next couple of weeks she will go on stage and sing old songs and carols and then everything will quieten down for a few days. Everything will fall into place for her. If it hasn't already.

Originally published in The Herald on December 1, 2011