Responses to my most recent column were evenly split, about half using the word “Scrooge” and the others using “Grinch.” (There were a few other words which are new to me, but I got the general gist.) It occurs to me that perhaps I was a little hard on those people who announce startling new Christmas trivia that I have heard every year since my increasingly distant childhood. There is, after all, always someone who HASN’T heard about Benjamin Franklin and the turkey, and I myself have been known to quote the aphorism that “Every joke is new to someone who hasn’t heard it before.”
I have ALSO been known to say (as noted by everyone who pointed out that I have also been known to tell the same stry numerous times: and here I thought you weren’t paying attention) that instead of censoring or rewriting things you don’t like, you should just offer something better. So I shave made up a list of Christmas trivia I have NOT s een sufficiently covered. Next time you want to give us the shocking news that eating poinsettias can make you sick, add in the answers to some of these burning Christas issues.
Where DOES that comma go in “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen”? I repeated for many years the tidbit that in the original printing of this song, the comma is moved one word over, making it “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”, making the song about how Christmas should make you relax about your afterlife. Then an institution published what they claimed was the earliest known printing, and there IS no comma in the title. Find that first lyric sheet and come to the point. (Yeah, punctuation puns get me right in the colon, too.)
Maybe you think that’s nitpicking; that’s what trivia is ABOUT, mistletoe goulash. Consider, the Island of Misfit Toys in the classic Sixties Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. My mother had an issue early on; at the end, when the elves are dropping the toys to houses below, handing each one a parachute umbrella, the toy bird refuses the umbrella and just flies down. But, as she pointed out, the reason the bird was ON the island was that it couldn’t fly. So how…. A recent TikTok expert addressed another question: why is that winsome doll on the Island? She has no obvious flaws, like the cowboy who rides the ostrich.
I, personally, look to another part of the story for my own question. Where did Yukon Cornelius keep his guitar? You recall that when we meet him, he is heading out to replenish his “life-sustaining supplies: gunpowder, corn meal, hamhocks, and guitar strings.” Are the guitar strings what he uses as a harness for the dogs on his sled? I do not see a guitar sticking out of his supplies. And did he or Sam the Banjo-playing snowman write “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas”, which completely obliterates the elf-written “We Are Santa’s Elves” by the end of the picture?
Luther’s Cradle Hymn, better known to Sunday School alumni as “Away in a Manger”, is so popular a poem that it has been set to at least three different melodies. We are frequently being told by Christmas trivia mavens that Martin Luther had nothing to do with it. He DID write some hit hymns, but not this one, which firat appears somewhere in the late nineteenth century. So who DID write it? My own theory is that it comes from some forgotten pageant about the life of Luther, but no one seems to know. Go find out.
When did it become fashionable to hate fruitcake? There are a lot of desserts our ancestors, for whom sweet things were a novelty except when fruit was ripe, adored that we avoid. But I have eaten some really good fruitcake, some of which were mainly cake and some of which were mainly fruit. At what point did fruitcake become the quintessential unwanted Christmas present, beating out old favorites like socks and long underwear?
How did red and green become the Christmas Colors? Santa’s suit was not originally red—another thing the Christmas trivia folk tell me every year—and Christmas trees were frequently brown, being made of carved wood. Do we just like seeing cardinals in spruce trees that much?
There are other possibilities, some of which may be unanswerable. Who invented the term “Stocking stuffer”? What WAS wrong with Tiny Tim? When did the Three Wise Men become Three Kings? (Is “Magi” just too hard to rhyme?) Mix a few of these in with your Christmas trivia next year, and maybe I will only grumble “humbug” to myself the next time you break it to me that Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” for the annual royalty check.
This will give me more time to write that blog about the Christmas SONGS that really tick me off.
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