Henry (Chip) Cheek
Dashing (2) through the snow (3)
On a one-horse open sleigh,(4)
O’er(5) the fields we go
Laughing all the way
(Ha, ha, ha).(6)
Bells on bob tails(7) ring
Making spirits(8) bright;
What fun it is to ride and sing(9)
A sleighing song tonight.
O —(10) jingle bells(11), jingle bells, jingle all the way;
O what fun it is to ride on a one-horse open sleigh
(Hey).(12)
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way;
O what fun it is to ride on a one-horse open sleigh.
[repeat](13)
(1) Composed by Rev. James Pierpoint in 1857 for a Thanksgiving celebration in Boston, Massachusetts. The carol was so popular among his Sunday School students that he revived it during that year’s Christmas celebrations — and the rest, as they say, is history. True to the gloomy Puritan roots of its city of origin, the carol includes an often-overlooked second verse which details a horrifying sleigh crash involving a “lean and lank” horse and a snowdrift. The song’s merry narrator and a “Miss Fanny Bright” are thrown overboard — to what end, the lyrics are eerily silent. I have chosen not to reprint the verse here; I believe it dampens the mood of the piece.
As a small child I preferred this carol — and others just as jolly, such as “Deck the Halls” and “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” — to the ones about Jesus, which were somber and slow and in minor keys. (“Joy to the World” was an obvious exception.) I remember asking my mother, who came from a large family and loved Christmas more than anything in the world, to explain the mysterious words of such carols as “Silent Night,” “O Holy Night,” and “What Child Is This?” — night songs, songs that asked questions. She told me I was a silly boy, those songs were about the true meaning of Christmas, which was Jesus Christ’s birthday, and they were very pretty songs, too. I looked at the stack of presents under our Christmas tree, mine and my brother’s, and tried to make sense of it all. Later, alone in my room, I listened to all the Jesus songs on my mother’s Perry Como Christmas album. I understood Jesus. I admired him a great deal. But these songs — beautiful though they were, and, I later recognized, far more melodically textured than “Jingle Bells” — spoke of three kings, and round-john virgins, and little drummer boys, and Israel, and the world lying in “sin and error pining.” What did these things have to do with Christmas? They were indecipherable images, and sometimes I had nightmares about them.
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(2) An odd choice of words for such a jolly song — evidence of a stern, coal-black inclination in its author, an ever-present fear of Eternal Damnation which Rev. Pierpoint, in all probability, wished to lash into his Sunday School students. (Or perhaps he simply meant to foreshadow the sleigh crash.) Follow the etymological path that begins with this word, and you will find nothing but violence. [1250-1300, ME, dasshen = slap, flap (v); blow, clash (n).]
Merry Christmas, indeed.
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(3) It never snowed in Houston. My mother always wanted it to snow, especially for Christmas. She went to arts and crafts stores and bought wicker sleighs and set them on tabletops covered with cotton balls. She sprayed fake snow on our fake tree. (My father said it was too expensive to buy a real one every year.) She fanned herself with a sprig of plastic holly and said, “Oh, I wish we lived where it would snow!” My father said, “Oh, I wish you’d shut up and be happy where you are!”
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(4) A small horse-propelled vehicle similar in design to that used by the mythical Santa Claus. Riders sat in the rear, in the same spot where Santa Claus would have stored his magical sack of toys. The Thanksgiving I was ten and my brother was 15, my father moved out of the house and left my mother his Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight, which had an enormous trunk. She took my brother and me to the mall and let us pick out all the things we wanted for Christmas. I got all the Transformers I hadn’t collected yet, and the Millennium Falcon, and a radio-powered robot that could pick things up and bring them to you. My brother shopped in solitude, came back to us with bags of clothes and a stack of tapes — AC-DC, Motley Crue, Quiet Riot. Our mother said that wasn’t good enough. She still had access to our father’s bank account and she intended to use it. She ordered my brother a stereo with a double-deck cassette player. She ordered me a TV and promised me a shopping spree at Toys R Us. She didn’t make us wait while she shopped for her own presents; she said she’d come back later to do that. It would have been the best Christmas I’d ever had, with my father out of the house and my mother spoiling us with presents, but her good mood didn’t last.
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(5) Note “over” would not have worked here. Rev. Pierpoint had a sharp ear for rhythm. Sometimes letters get in the way of a good line. Shakespeare, of course, was aware of this: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”
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(6) Most likely not in Rev. Pierpoint’s original. Still, it is a common enough addition to the carol that I have decided to include it here. In our sixth-grade Christmas pageant, of which “Jingle Bells” was the finale, we had to sing the “Ha, ha, ha.” I hated it — or I hated it that year, the year my father moved out. Other kids sang it with gusto: “HA! HA! HA!” But I couldn’t force myself to laugh. I’d come to appreciate the somber Jesus tunes, in fact: “Sleep in heavenly peace.” I saw my brother standing in the back, our clunky camcorder on his shoulder. As I’d expected, our mother wasn’t there. I mouthed the words: Ha. Ha. Ha.
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(7) Another violent word; it suggests the horse’s tail has been chopped to a stub and bedizened with bells. I swear, the more I read into the Reverend’s carol, the more ugly things I see in’t — terror, torture, humiliation.
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(8) My mother’s favorite vodka: Chopin. Her favorite gin: Bombay Sapphire. She hated scotch, whiskey, rum, and all forms of beer. She hated tequila by itself, but in a margarita she preferred Sauza. Wine went to her head too fast. Eggnog gave her gas.
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(9) No, no, no — she was a good mother: when she was drunk, she made my brother drive. In the twisted world of Rev. Pierpoint’s original, it’s a dark line — fun for now, but the crash is coming. Not for us. We kept Nat King Cole in the tape deck and made our mother sing along to it whenever we were in the car, even to the German version of “O Christmas Tree” — “O Tanenbaum, O Tanenbaum, yah-yah, yah-yah, blah-bloo-blah.” It cheered her up. One night, the week before Christmas, we drove around the rich neighborhoods of The Woodlands, the big houses where the residents had put up spectacular and vulgar arrays of lights. We drove away as soon as she said, “If we could’ve brought you boys up in a place like this …” We told her she didn’t have to worry about that, we’d had good lives so far, and things were going to get better now. “Jingle Bells” came on, and we sang merrily along. We hummed through the crash verse and looked vacantly out the windows, since none of us cared to remember the words.
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(10) I love the sustained “O”. You can hold it for as long as you like without ruining the song; I once saw a choir hold it for four measures. One note, enraptured, sung with eyes shut against sleigh crashes and divorce and bankruptcy and the sight of my mother passed out on the bathroom floor; one note forever anticipating something happy and bright, like a present you open slowly to make the excitement last. I wish I could suspend myself in that “O” for the rest of my life.
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(11) The first “jingle bells.” It never lives up to the promise of the “O”. Still, it’s a joyous moment — try to sing it without smiling.
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(12) I like this “Hey”. It follows naturally from “sleigh” and is much easier to sing than “Ha, ha, ha.” But like the latter, it was probably not in the original. Rev. Pierpoint, I feel certain, did not tolerate whimsical expressions. Thankfully later generations have improved on the original, rubbed out the severity and the death.
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(13) As many times as you want. Pretend, while you sing it, that it will never end. Eventually, of course, it will always end, and Christmas will be over, and Santa’s elves will go to sleep, and the stuffed animals and the wooden dolls will all return to Toyland.
On New Year’s Eve, the three of us sat on the couch and stared at the Christmas tree. Our mother sipped a Bombay Sapphire martini. My brother asked if we should take down the tree, and she held tightly to his arm and told him no, we’d leave it up this year until the needles fell off. At midnight, the ball dropped. My brother and I put our arms around her and tried to sing “Auld Lang Syne” (Scots: “the good old days”), but no one, I mean no one in the world, remembers the words to that one.
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