Ah, Jingle Bells. The song that has been hammered into your skull every December since approximately birth, played on steel drums in supermarkets, murdered by school recorders, and whistled tunelessly by colleagues who really should know better. It is, by any reasonable measure, inescapable. But here is the thing: the Jingle Bells dark history lurking beneath all that cheerful jingling is considerably more chaotic, litigious, and alcohol-adjacent than anyone has ever told you. Pull up a mince pie. This is going to get festive in the worst possible way.
It Was Not Actually Written for Christmas
Let us begin with the most delicious betrayal of all. Jingle Bells, the undisputed anthem of Christmas, was almost certainly not written for Christmas at all. James Lord Pierpont composed it in 1857, and the original title was The One Horse Open Sleigh, apparently written for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving! The American holiday that is essentially a dress rehearsal for eating too much before the main event of eating too much.
Furthermore, the song itself is not really about anything particularly wholesome. It is, at its heart, a boastful ditty about going very fast in a sleigh and impressing women. It reads less like a carol and more like the 19th-century equivalent of revving your engine outside a chip shop. Pierpont, one suspects, was a man with a great deal of opinions about horses and very little editorial restraint.
The Great Jingle Bells Town Rivalry
Here is where things get properly silly. Two American towns — Savannah, Georgia, and Medford, Massachusetts — have spent decades engaged in a furious argument about which of them can claim to be the true birthplace of the song. This is, if we are being honest, a wonderfully American dispute: a bitter, decades-long municipal feud over the intellectual property of a song about a horse.
Medford, to its credit, installed a commemorative plaque claiming the song for itself. Savannah, not to be outdone, also has a plaque. Consequently, there are now two plaques commemorating the same song in two different states, which is either a wonderful testament to civic pride or a complete waste of bronze. Possibly both.
The Jingle Bells Dark History Gets Even Murkier
The Jingle Bells dark history does not stop at a petty town rivalry, however. Pierpont himself was a rather turbulent figure. He was the uncle of none other than J.P. Morgan, the financier so extraordinarily wealthy that his nose alone was probably worth more than most Victorian neighbourhoods. Pierpont, meanwhile, appears to have spent much of his life lurching between financial disasters and bad decisions, which at least explains the frantic energy of a song about racing a horse at irresponsible speeds.
Meanwhile, the song holds the additional distinction of being the first piece of music broadcast from space, performed by astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford aboard Gemini 6 in 1965, using a smuggled harmonica and bells. NASA apparently had no strong feelings about this. The universe, however, has never quite recovered.
What This All Means for Your Christmas
In truth, none of this will stop Jingle Bells from playing on a loop in every retail establishment from late October until the bitter end of December. The cultural grip of Christmas music is absolute and merciless, and Jingle Bells sits at its cold, jingling heart. However, armed with the full Jingle Bells dark history, you can now ruin it for everyone around you at the office party. You are welcome. Merry Christmas, and may your sleigh be marginally less chaotic than Pierpont’s clearly was.
Read the original story at Cracked – Weird.
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