31 Things You Didn't Know about Holiday Songs - mental_floss - List Show (Ep. 239)

Hi, I'm Mike, this is Mental Floss on YouTube, and did you know that in the 50s the Catholic

Church condemned the song I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus? So the record label flew the 13-year-old singer Jimmy Boyd out to Boston to meet with the archdiocese

Afterwards, they determined that the song was okay after all. And that is the first of many facts about holiday songs that I'm going to share with

you today. Sorry it's going to get pretty Christmas-y up in here, but don't worry, we'll be back

to our secular ways soon enough. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, A Holly Jolly Christmas

and Run Rudolph Run were all written by the same man, Johnny Marks, who was Jewish

The Little Drummer Boy was originally known as the Carol of the Drums

The Von Trapp singers are credited with popularizing the song. Yes, those Von Trapps

The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker was written in 1891 for the Celesta

an instrument that was invented only five years earlier. Oh, hey, Nutcracker, this is a great outfit

Where do you shop? In 1906, Oh Holy Night became the second song

to ever be broadcast on radio. The singer of Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree

might sound old, but that is Brenda Lee, who was 13 years old at the time

The first Christmas song to mention Santa Claus was up on the housetop in 1864

These guys are slightly younger than that. Do You Hear What I Hear was written by two people

With the most Christmassy sounding names of all time, Noel Regney and Gloria Shane, it is also, as it turns out

about the Cuban Missile Crisis So next time you listen to Do You Hear What I Hear just keep that in the back of the mind Joy to the World was originally a song about Christ resurrection

and his second coming on Easter, not his birth. And the popular New Year song, Old Lying Sign

was never supposed to be associated with the holiday at all. One live band in New York coincidentally played it

just after midnight on the radio. Then, it became a tradition. Not long after, it also became a tradition

to turn to someone next to you at the New Year's party and say, what does Old Lying Sign mean anyway

I don't even know. The song It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year mentions that there will be scary ghost stories

which doesn't seem Christmassy, but in fact it was a holiday tradition that started in Victorian England

and has since died out. Spending all of that uninterrupted time with your family is scary enough

so there's no need for ghost stories. Just kidding. Mom and Dad, very excited to come home for Christmas

Thurl Arthur Ravenscroft sang You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch. He was also the voice of a Tony the Tiger for 50 years

Not gonna make a great joke. During World War I, there was a Christmas truce in which the French, English and German troops sang Silent Night

On the other hand, the BBC would not play the song I'll Be Home for Christmas during World War II

because they didn't want to lower the morale of their troops. Songwriter Meredith Wilson wrote

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in addition to the University of Iowa fight song and the music man

That guy had range. The group recording of Do They Know It's Christmas brought a feud between Boy George and George Michael

to popular consciousness. Of George Michael's recording, Boy George said, God, he sounded

camp. But then, he is. George Michael actually wrote the Wham song Last Christmas. He also got sued for it because

of its resemblance to the Barry Manilow song Can Smile Without You It was settled out of court Irving Berlin who wrote White Christmas hated Elvis cover of his song In the 50s he started a campaign to ban Presley version of the song from the radio

a process which proved akin to banning snow from falling. And speaking of which, Let It Snow was written by Sammy Kahn and Jewel Stein

during a 1945 heat wave in California. Another song that was written in the heat, The Christmas Song

also known as Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Apparently, songwriter Bob Wells was overheating, so he wrote a list of things that reminded him of cold weather

Chestnuts roasting, Jack Frost nipping, Yuletide carols, etc. And then, they became the start of a song

The residents of Armonk, New York, believe that the song Frosty the Snowman was written about their town

They even hold an annual parade in honor of it. We Three Kings was originally written in 1857 for a Christmas pageant at the General Theological Seminary in New York City

I imagine that's a little bit different than the one that you would find in a Charlie Brown Christmas

In the original Yiddish version of I Have a Little Dreidel, the dreidel is made out of blay, which means lead

It was translated to clay. Deck the Halls started as a dance tune

The lyric, follow me in merry measure, means join me in dance

Silver bells was originally called Tinkle Bells. Then songwriter Ray Evans told his wife about it, who responded

Are you out of your mind? Do you know what the word tinkle is

There are three, count them, three separate music videos for the Mariah Carey song

All I Want For Christmas Is You. And for some reason, I'm not surprised

When Winter Wonderland was written in the 30s some people were offended by the bit about Parson Brown marrying people on a whim The line was replaced with In the meadow we can build a snowman and pretend that he a circus clown

Grandma got run over by a reindeer was originally sung by Elmo Shrapshire

a veterinarian, which I guess means that there's some kind of professional expertise

supporting the described results of when grandmas and reindeers collide. Paul McCartney wrote, sang, and played every instrument for Wonderful Christmas Time

He still earns between $400,000 and $600,000 every year in royalties for the song

If you really received all the gifts from the 12 days of Christmas, there would be 364 presents total

Someone did the math in 2013 and determined that it would cost around $114,651.18

Finally, I returned to the salon to tell you that Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas was written for the Judy Garland film Meet Me in St. Louis

Originally, it contained lines like, Have yourself a merry little Christmas. It may be your last

Faithful friends who were dear to us will be near to us no more. But Garland insisted that the songwriter change them

because she was supposed to sing it to a seven-year-old and didn't want to seem like, I quote, a monster

Links to those things in the doobly-doo. And hey, DFTBA, and happy holidays