From the archives: Christmas songs

The price of twelve days of Christmas; the Christmas cannibalism song; the birth of the slow TV Yule log; and the mistranslation that led to some of the world’s most famous Christmas carols.

Annunciation
Govert Flinck / Public domain

Peace on Earth, and goodwill to all men” is a Biblical mistranslation. The original was closer to “Peace on Earth (only) to men of goodwill.”


Just how much do seven swans a-swimming cost, anyway?


In 1966 a New York TV station began a new holiday tradition: the Christmas fireplace show.


The popular Dutch Christmas song Flappie is perhaps the only popular Christmas song about cannibalism.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s