We’re less than two weeks away from Christmas, so Christmas music is everywhere. With the inescapability of Christmas songs, there’s bound to be some misheard or misunderstood lyrics. It could be the archaic language of some songs or the outdated 19th- and 20th-century phrasing of others, or maybe it's because Christmas music is often just in the background of our lives. Either way, Christmas carols are ripe for hearing lyrics wrong.
Misunderstood lyrics are called “mondegreens.” The term originated in a 1954 Harper’s Magazine column by Sylvia Wright in which she tells the story of a poem she misheard:
When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
Wright said that when she learned that the actual lines are “They hae slain the Earl of Murray / And laid him on the green,” she decided that what she heard was better. Thus a term was born.
“The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original,” she wrote.
Last week, my mom shared a video with me that jokingly suggested Brenda Lee sang something more nefarious than “pumpkin pie” in her classic “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” This isn’t the video my mom showed me, but it’ll give you the picture:
I’m not going to suggest that Lee is signing about pie that warrants R-rated words (even though I’m not a fan of pumpkin pie), so I’ll leave it up to you to judge, although I do have to say that I laugh every time I hear that line now. There are plenty of Christmas song lyrics that people don’t understand upon first hearing — or even repeat listens — and they’re not as salacious as the great Brenda Lee conspiracy theory.
I’ll go first. In my much younger days, I used to think that “Jingle Bells” contained the line “Bells on cocktails ring,” and more recently, I thought Kelly Clarkson sang, “Snow is falling with a capital C.” (It’s “Snow is falling as the carolers sing.”)
This isn’t a well-known Christmas song, but the first few times I heard Over the Rhine’s “Here It Is,” I thought Karin Bergquist was singing, “When they broke Gabriel’s horn” instead of “blow Gabriel’s horn.” Go figure.
The song that tripped me up the most in my younger years was “Winter Wonderland.” As a kid, I thought the lyrics were “In the meadow, we can build a snowman / And pretend that he is sparse and brown.” “Parson” wasn’t all that familiar a word to me, and I guess I pictured a skinny snowman made with nasty, dirty snow.
In my teenage years, another lyric confused me. I heard “Later on, we’ll conspire / As we dream by the fire / To face, I’m afraid / The plans that we made.” In my mind, the couple in the song was regretting the decision to get married.
Related: Christmas Music List: My Holiday 'Comfort Music'
I’m glad I’m not the only one who had some trouble with “Winter Wonderland.” PJ Media’s fearless leader, my friend and boss Paula Bolyard, said that she thought that the couple in the song would “perspire” instead of “conspire” by the fire. It makes more sense, doesn’t it?
Side note: This one isn’t Christmas-related, but Paula heard her granddaughter singing “Hosanna” instead of “Rosanna.” She said, “It was so cute I almost didn't want to correct her.”
A friend of mine told me that his wife thought that “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” contained the line “With the jelly toast proclaim, Christ is born in Bethlehem” when she was a child. That’s probably more appealing to a kid than the “angelic host” of the actual lyrics.
“Silent Night” is another repeat offender, particularly the line “Round ‘yon virgin mother and child.” A lot of people get “Round ‘yon” mixed up, leading to lines like “Brown John virgin” and “Long John virgin.” A couple of other ones I like are the “one horse soap and sleigh” in “Jingle Bells” and “Don we now our day of peril” in “Deck the Halls.”
Another side note: My friend and colleague Catherine Salgado told us in Slack, “My mom used to sing Silent Night in German and a St. Nicholas song in Slavic and I know my kid imitation of the foreign languages was atrocious.” It’s not a mondegreen, but I can just picture little Catherine slaughtering the German and Slavic languages.
Snopes, ClassicFM, and Reddit have entertaining lists of Christmas mondegreens. Do you have any Christmas song lyrics that you didn’t understand? Share them in the comments below.
