More than any other part of the church calendar, the liturgical demands and local traditions of the Christmas season (covering Advent, Christmastide and Epiphany), combined with the need for Catholic rehabilitation, permitted and even encouraged vernacular traditions in the context of the Catholic Mass and other seasonal devotions. The musical and devotional practices that emerged often produced exceptions to liturgical conventions typically encountered in the rest of the year. The resulting repertoire would flower particularly brightly in the Czech lands, leaving a monumental body of vernacular church repertoire with few parallels elsewhere in Catholic Europe. These tendencies are part of a broader pattern of music and devotion in the Czech lands that resulted in an exceptional body of vernacular church music across seasons and genres, but nowhere could these tendencies be seen as vividly as in the pastorella.

By the second half of the seventeenth century, in Catholic areas of central Europe, the term ‘pastorella’ and its variants had become associated with the Nativity narrative at Bethlehem. These evocations, including both instrumental and vocal music, usually include some or all of the following elements: shepherd's horn calls, the song of the angel announcing the divine birth, a reference to the sacred hour of midnight, the crib-rocking ceremony, peasants rushing to Bethlehem to play rustic music for the newborn Christ child, the presence of the animal kingdom, the appearance of the three kings, and often a light-hearted localised dialogue in much of the story (with shepherds having common vernacular nicknames, and so on).