The Christmas Song That’s Actually a Thanksgiving Song — No, the Other One

Hey, did you know that “Jingle Bells” was originally written as a Thanksgiving song? You did? Every “fun facts” Twitter account repeats that story every November? We can’t blame them. We’ve written about it ourselves. But it turns out there’s not one but two songs traditionally considered Christmas songs that are actually about Thanksgiving. The other one is “Over the River and Through the Woods.”

Well, it’s actually called “The New-England Boy’s Song About Thanksgiving Day,” or at least it was when Lydia Maria Child first published it in her 1844 collection of stories and poetry, Flowers for Children, which made its theme much clearer. This original poem comprises 12 verses, whereas only four are traditionally sung because that’s about the number people can remember after mainlining eggnog, and explicitly refers to Thanksgiving Day three times. There’s also a dog named Old Jowler (?) and a game called “snow-ball” (??). It’s honestly pretty upsetting.

It’s not clear when the song was first set to music, but it seems to have happened much earlier than when people started confusing it for a Christmas song. After all, its most famous appearance in pop culture is A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. It’s not clear when that happened, either, but we have our theories. In 1992, the height of what we’ll call “twinmania,” a made-for-TV movie starring Mary-Kate and Ashely Olsen called To Grandmother’s House We Go aired on ABC. It was about — you guessed it — going to their grandmother’s house for Christmas. They weren’t complex stories, the Olsen twins movies. Even a few weeks earlier, Kelsey Grammer sang the song on a Thanksgiving episode of Cheers, but in seemingly all media thereafter, from Barney to the Chipmunks, it was performed in the context of Christmas.

To be fair, it’s a pretty confusing song. There are numerous mentions of snow, and in most of the country, it doesn’t typically snow in November. That notably doesn’t include New England, but it just so happens that when Child wrote the song, the region was experiencing the “Little Ice Age,” so it was suffocating under even more snow than usual. This isn’t just a song about Thanksgiving — it’s specifically a song about Thanksgiving in New England in the early 19th century. We’re also going over that river and through those woods, as it’s explained several times, in a sleigh, and we just don’t ride sleighs for Thanksgiving anymore. They’re pretty confined to historical theme parks’ holiday celebrations or, if you’re Mariah Carey, the airport.

Most of all, though, if we’re being honest, “Christmas” just fits the meter of the poem better than “Thanksgiving.” Child’s Thanksgiving poem became immortalized as a Christmas song mostly because she was just kind of a lazy poet. 

But never forget who’s really to blame here, though. That’s right: the Olsen twins.