My son shook my world last year when he got in car after youth group and pronounced, “Did you know ‘Jingle Bells’ is actually a Thanksgiving song?”
Whaaaaaaaaaat?
Mind…blown. I sputtered. I gasped. I thought he was pulling my leg.
So of course, I had to look it up. And sure enough, the song was not written to be part of the Christmas season, despite it now being the most ubiquitous of Christmas songs. Nope. James Lord Pierpont, a native of Medford, Massachusetts, wrote the song to commemorate the annual sleigh races held in his hometown around Thanksgiving.
It’s believed that he originally composed the song around 1850, but it wasn’t published until 1857, with the title “One Horse Open Sleigh.” By that time, Pierpont had relocated to Savannah, Georgia…so maybe he wrote these snowy lyrics in fond remembrance of something he no longer got to participate in. 😉 The public was quick to adopt the song…and to change its name. That phrase from the refrain was just too good to resist!
“Jingle Bells” was first recorded on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889…which means people have been listening to recordings of it for 135 years now!
Do you know all the verses of “Jingle Bells”? It tells quite a fun story of a couple in the sleigh race!
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.