I’ll admit Thanksgiving wasn't my favorite childhood holiday.
For starters, there aren't any presents. OK, stop judging me! Be
honest, and you’ll have to agree that presents are pretty much the barometer
for holiday excellence when you’re a kid.
It didn’t help that I don’t
like any of the food Thanksgiving is famous for. No, really. Not the
cranberry sauce or the stuffing or the gravy or the dressing (which actually
might be the same as stuffing, I’m not certain), or sweet potato casserole, or
green bean casserole, or pumpkin pie. I
don’t even like turkey. Most childhood
Thanksgivings had me sitting at the kids’ table, eating a slice of dry turkey
slathered in ketchup with a side of cocktail olives.
Thanksgiving too often gets
skipped over nowadays, with Christmas decorations going up at Macy’s in
October and Christmas music on the soft rock station in early November. But don’t think that I’m skipping out on
Thanksgiving just because this book’s title is Jingle Bells—what you
might not know is that the song ‘Jingle Bells’ was actually written for the
Thanksgiving holiday!
Here are some other fun
facts about the song:
-'Jingle Bells' was the first
song sung in space. That’s right, on
December 16, 1956 the crew of Gemini 6 reported the sighting of “an object,
looks like a satellite going from north to south, probably in polar orbit... I see a command module and eight smaller modules in
front. The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit...." before bursting
into a rendition of the familiar tune.
-Both Medford, Massachusetts and Savannah,
Georgia claim to be the location where James Lord Pierpont composed the
song. We, of course, know it had
to be written in good ol' Georgia.
-The tune of ‘Jingle Bells’ has also been
used in German and French songs that celebrate the winter months, even though
their lyrics have nothing in common with our holiday classic.
-‘Jingle Bells’ was written in 1857 and
originally titled ‘One Horse Open Sleigh.’
-We can thank Carl Weismann
of Denmark for the timeless ‘dogs barking Jingle Bells’ phenomenon. Weismann was a bird song enthusiast, who was
annoyed by his recordings being marred by barking pests. He decided to edit out the barks, and then
linked the tape together, adjusting the speeds to manipulate the sound. This was a pretty complex task in the
1950s, and is considered one of the ground-breaking steps toward music
manipulation (I’m not going to say Weismann is to blame for Auto-tune, but I wonder
where Rebecca Black would be without him?)
-The horse mentioned in the song is not named ‘Bob’ or ‘Bobtail,’ but instead
that refers to the practice of ‘bobbing’ or ‘docking’ a horse’s tail, cutting
it very short to keep it from becoming tangled in the harness.
Have a fun and safe Thanksgiving holiday with the ones you love!
Labels: Holidays, Picture books, Read-Aloud