Was Jingle Bells Written for Thanksgiving?

Most people are familiar with the song "Over the River and Through the Wood." It's associated with Thanksgiving and the lyrics go like this:

Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather's house we go;
the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow. 

Over the river, and through the wood,
to Grandfather's house away!
We would not stop for doll or top,
for 'tis Thanksgiving Day. 

Over the river, and through the wood—
oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes and bites the nose
as over the ground we go.

There are more verses but you get the idea. I always associate this song with the 1973 TV special "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" since the kids sing it at the end of the show but the song actually dates back back to 1844. It was originally a poem composed by the Massachusetts author Lydia Marie Child. Child was born in Medford and her grandfather's house still stands in that city. (These days most people sing "to grandmother's house" rather than "grandfather's house.")

Currier and Ives, Home to Thanksgiving

The song is about riding a sleigh to Thanksgiving dinner (obviously). Although snow really isn't that common in Massachusetts in November sleigh rides (and snow in general) used to be major themes for Thanksgiving.

For example "Jingle Bells," another sleigh ride song, was also written for Thanksgiving. We now associate it with Christmas but that wasn't always the case. Interestingly, "Jingle Bells" was also written in Medford - James Pierpont supposedly wrote it at that town's Simpson Tavern in 1850. I guess Medford was the place to be for songwriters in the 19th century. (Thank you Snopes for the background on "Jingle Bells.") 

Snowy Thanksgiving were also common themes in the visual arts. For example one of Currier and Ives most popular prints was titled "Home to Thanksgiving," which shows guests arriving at a wintry New England farm.

So what's up with all this snowy Thanksgiving imagery? It doesn't snow that often in November in southern New England. Well, there are two answers. First, the climate was probably colder in the 19th century. The so-called Little Ice Age was just winding down when Child and Pierpont wrote their ditties but thing were still colder than they are today. Medford probably saw more November snow than it does now. 

There's also a cultural reason for the snow imagery. As I've mentioned in other posts, people in New England did not really celebrate Christmas widely until the 19th century. The Puritans who founded New England didn't celebrate the holiday because they didn't think there was a Biblical basis for it, and that tradition stuck in New England for many years. They did celebrate Thanksgiving though. Modern Christmas celebrations often feature snowy imagery in anticipation of winter, but Thanksgiving filled this role for our New England ancestors. 

Thanksgiving was the holiday that kicked off winter, not Christmas. Also Thanksgiving was not always celebrated in November. The date was announced by the local government and in some years Thanksgiving was celebrated in December. Historian James Baker notes that Thanksgiving could be celebrated as late as December 22. So sometimes Thanksgiving really was the start of winter. 

I got a lot of this information from James Bakers book Thanksgiving: The Biography of An American Holiday (2009). While explaining the snowy Thanksgiving imagery Baker also illuminated something about how we currently envision the holiday. Modern Thanksgiving imagery tends to focus on the harvest and on vibrant fall foliage but that's also a cultural creation. At least here in New England the harvest is over by late November and most of the trees have already lost their leaves. The leaves that do remain are brown and brittle. The natural world isn't looking very festive right now, which is probably why we brighten up Thanksgiving with thoughts of snowy sleigh rides or overflowing cornucopias. Whether Puritan or post-modernist we all need some holiday magic to get through the gloomy time of year. 

The Curse of Chocorua, and Its History

When Tony and I were up in the White Mountains in November I had hoped we'd be able to stop by Mt. Chocorua. Unlike most other mountains in New Hampshire, no trees or plants grow on the mountain's higher slopes. Why is it the lone stark, barren peak among its neighboring mountains?

The answer is that the mountain suffers from a curse placed on it by an angry Native American. I thought this would make a great blog post. Due to our schedule we unfortunately didn't get to Chocorua, but here's the blog post anyway.

The legend goes something like this. Chocorua was a Native American who lived with his young son in the area that is now Tamworth, NH. Unlike some other Indians in the area Chocorua was willing to trust the English settlers who were slowly populating the mountains. Even though his fellow tribesmen told him about the massacres and wars that had happened in southern New England, Chocorua still thought the newcomers should be given a chance.

Chocorua was particularly friendly with a settler named Cornelius Campbell and his family. One day Chocorua was called away for tribal business and asked if Cornelius could watch his young son while he was gone. Being a friendly neighbor, Cornelius said yes.

Thomas Cole, Mt. Chocorua, 1827. Thanks Wikipedia!

And here's where things go horribly wrong.

Cornelius and his family went out to work in the fields, leaving Chocorua's son alone in the house. Looking for something to drink, the little boy uncorked a bottle of fox poison and swallowed it down. By the time the Campbells returned home the child was stone-cold dead.

When Chocorua learned his son had died he was driven mad by grief. The Campbells tried to tell him it was an accident but he didn't believe them. "The other Indians were right! You Englishmen are murderers out to seize our land!" he cried before running off into the night. 

In revenge, the next day Chocorua murdered Cornelius's wife and children with a hatchet. Cornelius gathered together the other English settlers and they chased Chocorua through the forest up to the peak of a mountain. Realizing that he was trapped Chocorua turned to face his pursuers and delivered the following curse:

"A curse upon you, white men! May the great spirit curse you when he speaks in the clouds, and his words are fire! Chocorua had a son and you killed him while the sky looked bright. Lightning blast your crops! Winds and fire destroy your dwellings! The Evil One breathe death upon your cattle! Your graves lie in the war-path of the Indian! Panthers howl and wolves fatten over your bones! Chocorua goes to the Great Spirit. His curse stays with the white man."

Campbell fired his rifle, and Chocorua fell to his death from the mountain peak. His curse was swiftly fulfilled. The mountain where he died became barren. No crops would grow on its slopes, the trees on its summit died, and even the animals abandoned it. Any cattle who drank water near Chocorua died. The English settlers avoided the mountain, and its peak remains lifeless and barren even today.

I like this story, despite its grim ending. The cross-cultural misunderstanding and mistrust at the heart of it seem very realistic to me. I don't think we'll ever know the exact truth of the story, but it appears to be quite old.

A mountain named "Corua" is mentioned in Jeremy Belkap's 1784 Journal of a Tour of the White Mountains, and it is labelled "Chocorua" on a 1791 map. A few years later Henry Wadsworth Longellow wrote a poem called "Jeckoyva" about a mountain where an Indian chief was found dead at the base of a cliff.

The full story of the curse was first written down in October of 1828 by the painter Thomas Cole, who heard it while he was touring the White Mountains. Cole wrote in his journal:

We came out at length, to a lonely and deserted clearing, just at the foot of the mountain. The cause of this abandonment is, they say, the poisonous effects of the water upon the cattle; the result, according to tradition, of the curse of Chocorua, an Indian, from whom the peak, upon which he was killed by the whites, takes its name.

The brief legend that Cole wrote down was expanded by Lydia Marie Child in 1829 for a book called The Token: A Christmas and New Year's Present, which also contained an engraving by Cole showing Chocorua's death. Child's version became quite popular, and inspired multiple other variations, including the one I recounted above, which is from Charles Skinner's Myths and Legends of Our Own Lands (1896). (I found the history of the legend in an article by Lawrence Shaw Mayo in the September 1946 issue of the New England Quarterly.)

I do think there is a nugget of truth at the core of this legend, but I think the original details are probably lost in the early unrecorded years of the White Mountains.

America's Oldest Fruitcake

A good fruitcake can last a long time. The high sugar content in the cake helps it keep, and if you frequently moisten the cake with liquor it can last a very long time.

A very, very long time. America's oldest documented fruitcake was baked in 1878 by Fidelia Bates, and it is still in her family today. In 2003 her great grandson, Morgan Ford of Tecumseh, Michigan, brought the cake on Jay Leno's talk show. Despite possible health risks Jay ate a very small piece of the cake. He said it smelled good but tasted crystallized. That's pretty good praise for a cake that's 125 years old.



Michigan may have the oldest fruitcake, but the first fruitcake recipe written in the United States was published in Connecticut 1n 1798. It's contained in our country's first cookbook, AMERICAN COOKERY,OR THE ART OF DRESSING VIANDS, FISH, POULTRY, AND VEGETABLES, AND THE BEST MODES OF MAKING PASTES, PUFFS, PIES, TARTS, PUDDINGS, CUSTARDS AND PRESERVES, AND ALL KINDS OF CAKES,FROM THE IMPERIAL PLUMB TO PLAIN CAKE. ADAPTED TO THE COUNTRY, AND ALL GRADES OF LIFE. That's quite a title, but at least buyers knew what they were getting! The author is Amelia Simmons, about whom little is known except she was an orphan, a fact stated on the title page.

Simmons mentions something called plumb cake in the title of the book. Although it has a different name, the ingredients are nearly identical to a modern fruitcake. Here's the recipe:

Mix one pound currants, one drachm nutmeg, mace and cinnamon each, a little salt, one pound of citron, orange peal candied, and almonds bleach'd, 6 pound of flour, (well dry'd) beat 21 eggs, and add with 1 quart new ale yeast, half pint of wine, 3 half pints of cream and raisins...

She doesn't tell us how long to bake it or how many pans to fill, but with 21 eggs and 6 pounds of flour she probably had enough cake for the whole state of Connecticut.

The word "plumb" here is actually an older variant spelling of "plum", which centuries ago in England meant raisins or other fruit. So not only are the ingredients the same as a fruitcake, but the name is equivalent as well.

I'm not sure when fruitcake became associated with Christmas, and when it actually became known as fruitcake. Lots of cakes in America's past were really fruitcakes under another name. For example, election cake was a yeasted fruitcake. Lydia Child's 1833 cookbook The American Frugal Housewife has a recipe called wedding cake, but the ingredients are identical to a modern fruitcake. I personally love fruitcake, but I don't think most modern brides want it at their wedding.

Like Christmas itself fruitcake may have its origins in the ancient Greco-Roman world. A writer named Chrysippus claims the Cretans made cakes with nuts, fruit, spices and honey. I'm sure the Romans enjoyed similar treats as the celebrated Saturnalia, the pagan forerunner to Christmas. If a two-thousand year old fruitcake is unearthed I want to see Jay Leno take a bite!

Over the River and Through the Woods to Medford!

I'm a big fan of all the Charlie Brown holiday specials, but over the years my appreciation for A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving has really grown. I used to consider it the least significant of the Peanuts specials, but now it might be my favorite.

It also has a New England connection. As the show ends, after all the complications and emotional traumas have been resolved, the kids ride off to Charlie Brown's grandmother's house singing "Over the River and Through the Woods." Yay! A happy ending. (Then Woodstock and Snoopy eat turkey, which makes Tony wonder if Woodstock is a cannibal of some kind. I think the turkey is just a symbol of restored social order.)

The happy ending wouldn't be possible without Lydia Marie Child (1802- 1880) a novelist, abolitionist and cookbook author who was a native of Medford, Massachusetts. She wrote "Over the River..." for an 1844 book called Flowers for Children Volume II. The poem was originally titled "A Boy's Thanksgiving." You can see the full poem here.

The poem recalls Child's own trip to see her grandfather who lived near the Mystic River in Medford. His house still stands on South Street and is now owned by Tufts.

Grandfather's house image from this Tufts blog.

The tune for "Over the River and Through the Woods" apparently is from an old French folk tune but I'm not sure how it got connected to Child's poem.

These days some people are confused by the lyrics because they sound so wintry. Sleigh rides in November? Snow in Medford for Thanksgiving? Maybe she wrote it remembering one particularly cold year, or maybe the climate was different then. Global warming strikes again!

Because the lyrics are about snow, the song is sometimes associated with Christmas. I also think most people change the word's "grandfather's house" to "grandmother's house." We may be suffering from global warming but at least we have more equality between the sexes.

Have a great Thanksgiving. And as Charlie Brown says,"There's just one problem. My grandmother lives in a condominium!"

Crazy Cranberry Cures

The Boston Globe ran an article this week about a worldwide cranberry surplus. Farmers are growing more berries than in the past, and prices are dropping! To help increase global demand, the Cranberry Marketing Committee has been touting the alleged anitbacterial and antiaging powers of this tart little berry.

Cranberries are indigenous to New England, and their health benefits been speculated about for centuries. For example, I recently purchased a copy of the Lydia Marie Child's 1828 book, The American Frugal Housewife, which contains home remedies as well as recipes and household tips. Are you suffering from a corn on your foot? Use a cranberry, Mrs. Child says!

A corn may be extracted from the foot by binding on half a raw cranberry, with the cut side of the fruit upon the foot. I have a known a very old and troublesome corn drawn out in this way, in the course of a few nights.

I suppose I can see how this might work. Cranberries are acidic, so maybe the acid helps to dissolve the corn? However, I don't think this next cure would work at all.

The Indians have great belief in the efficacy of poultices of stewed cranberrries, for the the relief of cancers. They apply them fresh and warm every ten or fifteen minutes, night and day. Whether this will effect a cure I know not; I simply know that the Indians strongly recommend it.

OK, not even the Cranberry Marketing Committee would say that's an effective cure for cancer. Part of me wants to laugh at how quaint this cure is, but it also makes me realize how primitive medicine was in the early 19th century. There was no chemo, radiation or surgery available for cancer, so why not apply a poultice of cranberries? It probably couldn't hurt, and there weren't any other effective options.

Although Mrs. Child's medical knowledge seems simple by today's standards, she was quite progressive for her day. Born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1802, she wrote a scandalous novel about a white woman who marries an Indian (Hobomok), was an advocate for women's rights and the abolition of slavery, and published the first monthly American magazine for children. She also wrote the Thanksgiving poem Over the River and Through the Woods, for which she is perhaps most famous.