Even Santa can get stumped by some Christmas lyrics. Illustration by Christopher Healy
Along with other entirely reasonable queries about eternally confusing lyrics to classic holiday songs.1. What is the Spread of Stephen? And why is King Wenceslas celebrating that instead of Christmas? The Spread of St. Stephen, a.k.a. St. Stephen's Day, is a Christian holiday - and a public one in various European countries - honoring the first Christian martyr. It falls on December 26th or 27th (depending on the country), so I mean that technically makes "Good King Wenceslas" a post-Christmas carol. According to the website, IrishFestivals.net, a one-time tradition for holiday was to track and down a wren (the symbolization of St. Stephen). Then you'd tie the dead bird to a holly bush and dress it with ribbons. Cheery, no? Makes you really hope that partridge in the pear tree was still chirping.2. Speaking of which, what's a French hen? It sounds delicious. Faverolles are a strain of tufted French chickens that are pretty fancy-looking and lay tinted eggs, so I think they might have made nice gifts back when "The 12 Years of Yule" was written.3. And while we're on the topic: Since when is Christmas 12 days long? Well, since the root of Christianity. For centuries, people celebrated Christmas as a almost two-week extravaganza, from December 25th to January 5th. The Spread of St. Stephen was actually the 2nd day of Christmas (Hey, it's all start to get together now). The final day was known as "Twelfth Night" - as in the Shakespeare title - and was the traditional time for wassailing.4. Oh, yeah: What's wassailing? Does it give something to do with that town Sarah Palin is from? No. Wassailing is an ancient custom of going door-to-door singing Christmas songs. Cute people in very quaint towns still do it today.5. Carols at someone's door I get, but what about "carols at the spinet?" Ah, yes. That argument comes from "We Take a Little Christmas," which is actually a Broadway show tune. It first appeared in the musical "Mame." A spinet is a small, upright piano - just the case of tool you frequently see adorable families standing about and singing "Jingle Bells."6. That reminds me: What's a bobtail? You know: "Bells on bobtails ring?" A bobtail is a knight that has had its tail cut short. We can accept that the one horse pulling that open sleigh has had such a trim, and that it is wearing bells that do indeed jingle. We can also accept that the term bobtail was less confusing to people back when that call was written.7. Speaking of sleigh rides, what is, or who are Currier and Ives? Well, it's definitely not "courier endives," as I formerly thought the language said, assuming it to be around some kind of special salad green for messengers. When the song "Sleigh Ride" compares the holiday scene to "a film print by Currier & Ives," it's referring to the nineteenth-century duo of Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives who produced a lot of bucolic art prints that were iconic of the era, including several featuring sleigh rides, like "American Homestead Winter," "Trotting Cracks in the Snow," and "A Release Out on the Snow," the death of which depicts a somewhat scary sleigh collision and feels like the 1800s variation of Failblog.8. What's up with scary stuff at Christmas? "The Most Wonderful Time of Year" says, "there'll be scary ghost stories." Were the songwriters thinking of Halloween? No, they were probably thought of the old custom in the U.K. of telling ghost stories on Yule Eve. Dylan Thomas, in his story, "A Child's Christmas in Wales," mentions just such a tale-telling by the fire, and the play adaption of the Dylan's story shows the family trying to one-up one another with increasingly frightening yarns. The truly mysterious bit here is that "It's the Most Fantastic Time of the Class" was scripted in the sixties by two American guys. Spooky.
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