If you can recall the very first lyrics to Jingle Bells sound eminently Christmassy; “Dashing through the snow, in a one-horse open sleigh, over the hills we go, laughing all the way…” Horses aren’t really associated with Christmas and although snow certainly is, there’s not really anything else to link the song to everybody’s favourite Christmas holiday entertainment song. The reason for that? It isn’t a Christmas song.

You might think of Jingle Bells being a Christmas classics, it isn’t actually a Christmas song! Read on to find out more to the history of this festive tune. Or not-festive tune as the case may be.

The song we sing today was written by a man named James Lord Pierpont in or around 1850. Nobody is exactly sure of the precise time at which it was written or indeed, where. What we do know is that Pierpont was an American and although he hailed from Medford in Massachusetts, he only published the song when living in Savannah, Georgia. The only reason that this is of importance is that both towns lay claim to being the birthplace of Jingle Bells.

You see, although we only ever sing the first verse and chorus, there are many more lyrics to Jingle Bells that none of us really know. Some believe that the song was written for children to sing to the congregation at Sunday School. The verses none of us know go in a pretty intriguing direction with references to the sleigh crashing, a race with another sleigh owner and picking up women: “Now the ground is white, go it while you’re young, take the girls tonight, and sing this sleighing song. Would children sing that? Probably not, though one could easily argue for the innocence of youth.

Others believe that Jingle Bells is actually a drinking song. Historians are aware that it was a hugely popular song to sing at private parties, with guests ‘jingling’ the ice cubes in their glasses as they sang. Jingle all the way indeed! So which holiday is it about? If we go back to what we’ve previously written, the clue might be found in the history of Medford, Massachusetts. Back in the 1840s and 1850s, the Medford Sleigh Races were a hugely popular event with townsfolk cheering on the sleighs as they tore around the town. But they didn’t take place in December! They actually took place during Thanksgiving, which makes Pierpont’s classic ballad a song for the holidays, just not the one we all thought!