The year is 1888, and the city of London is gripped by terror because of the ripper murders. This serial killer mutilated at least five women at night around certain impoverished districts of the city, though other killings were also believed by many to have been committed by the same person. Newspaper coverage of the murders turned into one of the first true media frenzies, and the result has been a lasting legacy of myths and pseudohistory surrounding the murders. The story of Jack the Ripper is one I’d certainly like to tell one day on this podcast, but this Christmas season, I want to focus on another story that is said to have occurred in this time, while all of London was locking their doors, afraid of the bloody phantom killer stalking the streets. That year, during the week before Christmas a young girl named Carol Poles went missing. When the authorities failed to find young Carol, her family and others from her community banded together to find her, terrified that she might become the victim of the Ripper, if that wasn’t already her fate. However, as they went from house to house, knocking on doors and asking about their dear Carol, few would open their doors and talk to them, fearing that it was the Ripper lurking outside their door. Therefore, as a signal that they meant no harm to the occupants of each home they visited, they sang Christmas songs outside each door, and only when the residents opened up did they inquire whether little Carol Poles had been seen. Alas, they never found young Carol, but every year, they kept up the tradition in her memory, singing songs from door to door, and that is why we call Christmas songs sung from door to door Christmas Carols. Isn’t that a fascinating story. Too bad it’s utter nonsense. It’s unclear where this urban legend originated, but it’s very clear that it is hogwash. If they first called Christmas songs carols in 1888, it’s rather hard to explain why Charles Dickens called his novella A Christmas Carol in 1843. So where does the word “carol” come from? Some identify John Awdlay, a chaplain in Shropshire, as being the author of the earliest known English usage of this word when he compiled a list of 25 “caroles of Cristemas” in 1426. Certainly the Oxford English Dictionary confirms it was well in use by the 1500s. As for its origin, some, like Andrew Gant, author of one of my principal sources for this episode, The Carols of Christmas, claim that its derivation is murky and that it is said to have been borrowed from many different languages. The Oxford English dictionary tells us the English word was in use as far back as the 1300s referring to songs or dances generally, and not necessarily those associated with Christmas, and it traces the word etymologically to Old French. However, from there the origins do indeed become obscure, and there is debate over whether it may be derived from the Greek-Latin chorus or some other ancient derivation, such as the Latin corolla, or little crown, referring to the ring-dances also called “carols.” So as we begin to look closely at these famous songs of Christmas, we already see a patchwork of myths, misinformation, and historical blind spots.

We cannot begin our study of the little known history and surprising facts behind certain well-known Christmas carols without first properly delving into the true history behind the tradition of caroling from door to door, as we hear in the classic carol “Here We Come a-Wassailing.” This tradition has its roots in the older forms of Christmas that I spoke about in my first Christmas special, when it was more of a midwinter bacchanal that saw the norms of society, from gender to class, upended topsy-turvy style, which of course I also spoke further about in my second Christmas special. If you haven’t listened to those, you’ve got plenty of fun seasonal listening in store this holiday. The word “wassail” can be traced to an Old Norse toast to one’s health. “Waes hael,” was toasted, essentially meaning “Be healthy,” and the response was “Drinc hael,” whereupon the toasters drank. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote in the 12th century that it entered the English language when the Anglo-Saxon chieftain’s daughter Rowena taught it to Vortigern, King of the Britons, though this is pure mythologizing. How this toasting became specifically associated with Christmas is unclear. The toast was commonly shouted at coronations, some of which occurred in Christmas time during the 11th and 12th centuries, including those of William the Conqueror and Stephen of Blois. However, it may simply be because people did a lot of drinking during the wild old Christmas festivities. Since then, though, the toast has evolved in meaning. A wassail is a drink, typically some kind of spiced ale, commonly drunk in Christmas and Twelfth Night festivities, and the verb, wassailing, refers to the nocturnal visits of the poor to houses of the affluent. These house-to-house visits were not the mannered and lovely caroling of today, however, but rather a kind of drunken form of panhandling in which wassailers asked for money or food. Often the singing was more of a threat. If the occupants did not treat them generously, they would annoy them with their intoxicated caterwauling until they got what they wanted. This, the true nature of Christmas caroling, may surprise some of you listeners, but Christmas carols are full of surprises like this. When you look into them, you find that lovely songs may not be about what you think they’re about, may not even be about Christmas at all, and may have a surprising history behind them.

A Christmas Eve 1842 issue of the *Illustrated London News*, depicting Father Christmas in a wassail bowl.

Ever since the premiere of A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, watching it has become something of a national tradition in the U.S. In 1992, the Peanuts gang returned with an all-new Christmas special, It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown. Just as the first special had encouraged a more traditional Christian view of the holiday, the new special once again had Linus turn to the Bible for some insight, this time seeking an understanding of the classic repetitive song The Twelve Days of Christmas. “That song drives me crazy,” says Sally. “What in the world is a calming bird?” In response, Linus cracks open a Bible and says, “A calling bird is a kind of partridge. In 1 Samuel 26:20, it says: ‘For the king of Israel has come out to seek my life...just as though he were hunting the calling bird.’ There's a play on words here, you see? David was standing on a mountain, calling. And he compared himself to a partridge being hunted.” In reality, “calling birds” are not “a kind of partridge.” In fact, the original English version of this song, first published in the 18th century as a children’s rhyme, actually describes the 4th day’s gift as “colly birds,” which referred to European blackbirds. Oddly, among the many translations of this verse in 1 Samuel, none matches what Linus reads, and most translate it as a partridge, not a “calling bird.” It’s very strange then that they didn’t just have Linus talking about the first day’s gift, the iconic partridge in a peartree. But this line too sparks debate among ornithologists, since a partridge is a ground bird that would not typically be found in a tree. Some have looked to an alternate version of the song which says that on the first day of Christmas, the true love gives “a part of a juniper tree,” suggesting some corruption has turned it into a partridge in a peartree. However, most of the gifts in the song are game birds, so it would stand to reason that it is a partridge. Another explanation lies in the fact that the original English version was a translation of an older French rhyme, Les Douze Mois, The Twelve Months, not a Christmas rhyme at all. It is pointed out that the Old French word for a partridge was un perdrix, which sounds very much like a peartree. However, if the line was originally bilingual, “A partridge and un perdrix,” that would make it a gift of two birds on day one, spoiling the whole structure of the song. Regardless of what the original line was and how it was corrupted, one thing is certain. The song is absolutely not derived from that verse in 1 Samuel that Linus implies it is from.
Charles Schulz would not be the last to suggest that this classic Christmas song, which had evolved like so many others from earlier versions that were not about Christmas at all, actually has some religious meaning that it doesn’t really have. Since the 1990s, a claim has been circulating the Internet that the Twelve Days of Christmas was actually a secret coded Catholic catechism dating to the English Reformation, when Catholics could not openly practice their faith. However, this claim, often credited to 20th century Canadian hymnologist Hugh McKellar, doesn’t make much sense on a number of levels. First, the code itself is asinine. It says the twelve drummers drumming represented the twelve points of the Apostles Creed; the eleven pipers piping were actually the eleven apostles (minus the Twelfth Apostle, Judas Iscariot); the lords a-leaping clearly must represent the 10 Commandments; the ladies dancing were the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit; the maids a-milking stood for the eight beatitudes; the swans a-swimming represented the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit; the geese a-laying were the six days of creation, the five golden rings really the five Books of Moses or Pentateuch; the four calling birds could be the four gospels; three French hens were the three gifts of faith, hope, and love; two turtle doves stood for the Old and New Testaments; and the partridge in a pear tree symbolized Jesus Christ on the cross, with God himself as the “true love” that gives all these things. The clearest refutation of this claim was given by Snopes, which pointed out that there is simply no support for this claim beyond the simple repeating of the claim itself. If we look at all these supposed symbolic connections, there is no correlation beyond the numbers of the things. There is no clear reason to associate Christ with a partridge, or leaping lords with commandments, or milkmaids with beatitudes. Also, besides the fact that there were varying levels of toleration of Catholicism in the centuries between Henry VIII and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, most of these secretly coded symbols, with the exception of the 12 points of the Apostle’s Creed, are just Christian things, not explicitly Catholic things. It’s not as though the Reformation did away with all talk about Christ, his Apostles, the Holy Spirit, and the books of the Old Testament. In fact, the time when the contents of the song might have been forbidden would have been during the English Civil War, when Puritans briefly outlawed Christmas, but in that case, it would have been the carol itself that was banned, not the mere mention of certain Christian concepts. While this Christmas carol myth is altogether ridiculous, it is perfectly representative of the way people simply don’t understand the origins of their favorite seasonal songs and sometimes choose to completely invent a fictional origin that suits their worldviews.

Statue of Saint Wenceslaus in St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague

One classic Christmas song, with an earworm melody and an uplifting message of Christian charity in the face of a harsh winter, is Good King Wenceslaus, but the history behind this popular Christmas song reveals that it is not quite what it seems. First, there is the ancient history of King Wenceslaus himself, who was actually a 10th century Duke of Bohemia, named Václav. According to the legend that that would see him later venerated as a saint and remembered as a king by Czechs, he was an honorable and virtuous ruler, devoted to Catholicism despite the pagan beliefs of much of his family, and he was known for his great charity to the lowliest of his subjects. This is the legend that would inspire the songwriter who would further immortalize him, but the reality of his life was rather more violent than the song lets on. When his father died, his grandmother became regent, but his pagan mother resented her and had her murdered, strangled with her own veil, it is said. When his mother took control, she suppressed Christianity, leading to a rebellion and coup by Christian noblemen who ended up exiling her and installing a teenage Václav as duke. His duchy was beset on all sides by enemies, from Magyars to Saxons, as well as from within, by conspirators who had gathered around his pagan twin brother, the resentful Boleslav who wanted power for himself. Duke Václav was eventually killed by his brother’s supporters, and supposedly run through by his own brother with a lance while celebrating the birth of Boleslav’s son. This has been portrayed in the many biographies and hagiographies of Václav as a trap laid by his brother, who had invited the duke to celebrate his son’s birth all the while planning to assassinate him, but this may very well be an embellishment meant to further portray the Catholic duke as a martyr of his faith, killed by pagan usurpers. In truth, the invitation may have been a genuine peace offering that only turned violent when a drunken argument broke out. It’s impossible to tell because the history of Václav comes to us principally through the aforementioned hagiographies, the purpose of which are to encourage the elevation of their subjects to sainthood, and thus are inherently unreliable.

Thus the image of Good King Wenceslas as a barefoot penitent who gave everything to the poor, the so-called “father of all the wretched,” is unlikely to have much relationship to the true character of the man. But it was just such hagiography that inspired Victorian clergyman John Mason Neale to write the famous hymn about him. Of course, the story that Neale describes in the hymn, of Wenceslas and his page trudging through the snow and risking frostbite to carry food and firewood to a poor subject living up a mountain, is pure fiction, a bit of further hagiography. Neale wrote the lyrics to the tune of an old Latin hymn, “Tempus adest floridum,” which in translation means, “Spring has unwrapped her flowers.” And he wrote it not as a Christmas song, but as a hymn for St. Stephen’s Day, observed in the liturgical calendar on December 26th. This much is clear from the first lines of the song, “Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even…” So we have a hymn adapted from a song about spring to celebrate St. Stephen’s Day, all about a Bohemian duke whose pagan family made a habit of bloody coups. Where is Christmas here? Is it enough simply to talk of snow? Or is it the least mention of Christian charity? And what of the beliefs of the hymn writer, John Mason Neale? Does it spoil his song entirely that he chose as his subject a Catholic saint for song to be sung by choristers in the Church of England? Many of his contemporaries certainly thought so, accusing him of idolatry and crypto-Catholicism because of his high church sympathies, leading even to mobs threatening to stone him and burn his home to the ground. Once, at the funeral of a nun, he was physically assaulted for his encouragement of Anglo-Catholicism. So the question, very relevant to the history of other Christmas carols, becomes this: how much might the biography of a songwriter cast different light on a well-known Christmas song?

James Pierpont, the unsavory character who wrote “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” better known today as “Jingle Bells.”

The perfect example of a carol-writer’s life completely changing a Christmas carol can be found in one of the most upbeat, light-hearted, and seemingly innocent of all Christmas songs: Jingle Bells. Since learning more about its composer, I personally have not been able to listen to this previously lovely song without some distaste. There is actually some debate over where the song was written, with both Medford, Massachusetts, and Savannah, Georgia, claiming to have been its birthplace. In truth, both have some rightful claim, since its composer, James Pierpont, was surely writing about his memories of snowy Massachusetts when he wrote the lyrics, for the city in which he actually wrote it, Savannah, is not known for snow. James Pierpont came from a family of Unitarian preachers, but he wasn’t very pious himself. At fourteen, he ran away from boarding school and went to sea, where he seems to have picked up some poor character traits. Returning to his family’s hometown of Medford, Mass., seven years later, he took a wife and fathered three children, but he promptly abandoned them to seek his fortune Out West, in San Francisco. After losing everything to a fire and then losing his wife, who remained back east, to tuberculosis, he did not return home to raise his children. Instead, hearing that his brother John had started a church in Savannah, he left his children in his father’s care and went south to play the organ. There in Savannah, as his brother preached an increasingly unpopular anti-slavery doctrine to his Southern congregation, James seems to have fallen into scandal. He took a new bride, fathering a child with her years before their nuptials, according to one census, and thereafter begetting more, a second brood, seemingly without much thought for the three children he had left behind in Massachusetts. Looking at his most popular song, the Christmas song he titled “The One-Horse Open Sleigh,” we can see that it’s not really about Christmas. Once again, it’s simply the presence of snow that has made it a Christmas standard. Rather, the song is about wooing ladies, and may illustrate James Pierpont’s reputation as something of a rake. Its full lyrics are about taking a young lady out for a sleigh ride, and then being shown up and humiliated by another “young gent.” The message of the song seems to be that you get more girls with a more impressive sleigh, as summed up in its final stanza, “Go it while you’re young. Take the girls tonight.” Think of it like a more modern song that might talk about impressing one’s conquests with a flashy car.

Besides this song, Pierpont’s other lyrics further betray his low character. He wrote more than one song complaining about having to pay his debts. And his numerous minstrel songs betray his drifting away from his Unitarian roots toward a more Southern and racist mindset, especially one titled “The Colored Coquette.” Finally, when his abolitionist preacher brother returned home to Massachusetts at the outbreak of the Civil War, James showed his true colors. He remained in Savannah, and he joined the Confederate army, serving in a cavalry regiment for two years, and he wrote numerous Confederate war songs, including “Strike for the South,” the lyrics of which unironically argue that Confederates fought for liberty; “We Conquer or Die,” whose lyrics suggest that defeat (read: the end of slavery) was a fate like unto death; and “Our Battle Flag!” which told Confederate soldiers that if they died in battle, they went to a “hero’s grave.” So there you have it. Next time you hear Jingle Bells, you, like me, may have a hard time not thinking about the child-abandoning, debt-evading, womanizing, white supremacist secessionist who wrote it. And ironically, his nephew, John Pierpont Morgan, or J.P. Morgan, the famously ruthless banker of the Gilded Age, has been unfavorably compared to that iconic Christmas film villain, Henry Potter, of It’s a Wonderful Life. Now, I’m not suggesting that the art cannot be separated from the artist, that this classic Christmas carol, so simple and popular among children, should be canceled. Rather, I’m saying that, if knowing this kind of spoils the song for you, as it does me, then maybe you delete it from your Spotify Christmas playlist. And there is a contemporary alternative with which you might replace it. “Up on the Housetop,” a jaunty and genuinely Christmas-y song about Santa Claus’s visit, was also written during the Civil War, but its composer, Benjamin Hanby, was an abolitionist through and through, whose family is said to have worked the Underground Railroad. Like Pierpont, he too wrote other songs, like “Darling Nelly Gray” and “Ole Shady,” which unlike other songs about slavery in that era actually highlighted the cruelty of the institution with a focus on its separation of families.

The Illustrated London News's illustration of the Christmas Truce.

Much as Jingle Bells was never really about Christmas, so too another iconic Christmas carol, Oh Christmas Tree, was never really about Christmas trees per se. Nevertheless, it plays a central role in one of the most cherished modern Christmas stories, which itself may be somewhat embellished. Many have heard the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914, when during an unofficial ceasefire on the Western Front, German and British soldiers crossed the trenches, sang Christmas carols, and played football, or soccer as Americans like me would call it, all of it to the chagrin of their sternly disapproving generals. Like most stories in history, this one too has gathered a variety of myths and misconceptions on its way through the years. For example, it was not so general a truce as some might believe, with hostilities continuing in many places, and the military leadership was not so disapproving as the legend would have it. They did not angrily take action to halt the armistice or discipline those soldiers who had participated in it or censor news about it afterward, as would later be claimed. Even the soccer matches seem to have been greatly exaggerated, with most accounts of them originating from rumors or reports that games of football had been proposed but never actually played because the soldiers didn’t actually have a ball handy. The carol-singing does appear to have been accurate though, and the song they often as not sang together was one well known in both their languages: “O Christmas Tree” to the British, and “O Tannenbaum” to the Germans. But the two were not really singing about the same thing. Tannenbaum more accurately translates to fir tree; turning this song into an ode to Christmas trees was a bit of creative mistranslation.

The song and its melody both evolved from different folk traditions. When Bavarian composer Melchior Franck wrote the lyrics in the 17th century, praising the evergreen tree for its hardy survival through the harsh cold of winter—a lesson on perseverance and stoicism in the face of cruel hardship—he was taking part in a long folk tradition of poetry and song that used evergreens as metaphors. But the lyrics would not be set to its recognizable melody until arranged by another German composer, Ernst Anschütz, in 1824. The tune he used can also be traced back to an old Westphalian folk song, the lyrics of whose later iteration, popular as a drinking song among German students in the Middle Ages, spoke of Roman poet Horace, his romance of women, his drunken merrymaking, and his intention to live in the moment and enjoy life, or carpe diem, as Horace would have said. In some sense, the song’s association with Christmas seems natural: the imagery of greenery in the winter lends itself well to the seasonal festivities, which have always been about celebrating the persistence of life in the midst of the winter’s cold lifelessness, and even its melody’s now lost association with merrymaking connects perfectly with the true Saturnalian origins of the holiday. But it occurs to me that, during the Christmas Truce, while the British might have sung the song with visions of Christmas trees festooned with gaudy decorations in mind, the Germans may have been thinking more about the intended meaning of the song, about precious life surviving in a cruel world and the need to persevere like the evergreen through this ghastly, numbing time. And unknowingly, all of them were acting in accordance with the old theme associated with the song’s melody, seizing the day, plucking some few moments of joy for themselves before time marched them on, many of them to their deaths.

Publicity photo of American entertainers Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien, who played her little sister in *Meet Me in St. Louis*

Even the meanings of more modern Christmas songs are not always what many think they are, or what they were at first meant to be. For example, my father’s favorite Christmas song is “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” because, according to him, it’s so hopeful and uplifting. Dad, I know you listen to the podcast occasionally, so first, Merry Christmas, and second, you know I’m going to explode your understanding of this song. I’ve talked to you before about how this classic Judy Garland showtune is not hopeful but bleak and not uplifting but rather devastating. Well, now let’s go even further into why this song only seems positive because it was more than once revised to alter its tone. The song was originally written for the musical Meet Me in St. Louis, a classic that I recommend everyone view this season. In the musical, a family’s patriarch has decided to move them all from St. Louis to New York, and none of his girls is happy about it. The song is sung by Garland’s character, Esther, to her little sister Tootie, who is afraid that Santa won’t be able to find her in New York. Esther is melancholy herself in the scene, looking pensively out a window at the snow and thinking about the young man she’ll have to leave behind because of their cross-country move. This is the context of the song, full of pain because of a major life change that seems to be the end of their lives in the city they love, and its lyrics’ talk of having a merry Christmas is ironic and even rueful. When the song was first written, the lyrics better reflected this tone. Esther was to sing “Have yourself a merry little Christmas; it may be your last; next year we will be living in the past.” We have Judy Garland to thank for the somewhat brighter tone of the song in the film. She had been performing USO tours and had seen firsthand how another sad and yearning song of hers, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” had taken on greater meaning to troops who saw in it a song about their eventual return home from service. She felt that a revision of the lyrics to this song could make it similarly meaningful on more than one level. That and she thought her character came off a bit mean singing the harsh original version to an already tearful child. So the lyrics were changed from “No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who were dear to us will be near to us no more” to the more familiar “Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who are dear to us gather near to us once more.” Yet still the song retained its melancholic heart, with a line at the end that “we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” The song did not see its final, joyful sanitization until 14 years after it was written, when Frank Sinatra wanted to include it in his album and came to the original songwriter, complaining that the “muddle through somehow” line still made it too sad. “'The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas,” he said “Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?” And thus was born the line “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” and the original tone of the song was finally lost to any who hear it divorced from its intended context. Only the pathos in Judy Garland’s original performance of the song hints at the utter despair that the sung was meant to evoke.

In my previous Christmas specials I have spoken at length about the problems with the biblical nativity story, as well as the numerous myths and mysteries that derive from it. These include the true date of Christ’s birth, the time of year when he was born and the likelihood of shepherds tending their flocks at night during that season, the legend of the Christmas star, and the mythos of the Three Magi. Many of these elements of Christmas mythology owe their immortality to their inclusion in more than one Christmas carol. One example of a carol portraying the nativity, whose depiction has caused some controversy and debate, is Away in a Manger. One line in this song mentions “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” and its critics have gone so far as to call the song heretical. This innocent line about a placid babe, they said, suggests that Christ did not display human qualities, like a full range of emotion, and as such the song took part in the notorious heresy called Docetism. But whatever one thinks of this terribly serious debate, the song “Away in a Manger,” formerly called “The Cradle Song,” serves as a final apt example of the mystery and misconception that surrounds so many Christmas carols. The song is popularly attributed to Martin Luther, the famed church reformer. It was said that he wrote the song as a lullaby for his children. It’s feasible enough. Luther is known to have written hymns. But in fact, it does not appear to be true at all, having only first been claimed in 1884 by a Universalist newspaper whose editors regarded Martin Luther very highly. The true author of the lyrics remains unknown, and even harder to pin down is the composer of its melody, for it has been sung to many different tunes through the years. In a 1951 article, music scholar Richard S. Hill identified no less than 41 distinct tunes that have been used for the song. As with “Away in a Manger,” it seems the history of most Christmas carols is confounded by blind spots and myths. In this way, it reflects well on the history of the holiday generally. Those who bloviate like Linus about the “true meaning” of Christmas, or demand some adherence to a perceived original tradition of the holiday, fail to understand that the original meaning is mislaid in a confusion of misconceptions and mysteries, and that today’s traditions are just a jumble of whatever stuck through the years, their original forms lost to time. Such is the case with all folk tradition.

A Very Historically Blind Christmas Carol

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