"Jingle Bells" Has Nothing to Do With Christmas

"Jingle Bells" Has Nothing to Do With Christmas

Read the lyrics. Go ahead. There's not a single mention of Christmas anywhere in the song.

No Santa. No gifts. No December 25th. Nothing.

It was written in 1857 by James Lord Pierpont as "The One Horse Open Sleigh" — a song about winter sleigh racing and trying to impress girls.

The original lyrics included lines like "Go it while you're young / Take the girls tonight" — which was considered slightly scandalous at the time. It was basically the 1850s equivalent of a song about picking up girls in a fast car.

Its first public performance? A blackface minstrel show in Boston. The composer? James Lord Pierpont — who later joined the Confederate Army and wrote songs like "Strike for the South" and "Our Battle Flag."

Oh, and he was the uncle of J.P. Morgan.

The song became associated with Christmas decades later, purely because it mentioned snow and bells. That's it.

In 1965, it became the first song ever broadcast from space when astronauts on Gemini 6 smuggled a harmonica aboard and played it as a prank on Mission Control.

So the world's most famous "Christmas song" was written by a Confederate, first performed in blackface, contains zero Christmas references, and was launched into orbit as a joke.

Merry Christmas. 🎄