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Morbid Jingle Bells

Posted By Naifang Hu On May 1, 2015 @ 6:49 am In general | Comments Disabled

I was first taught this song at the age of 10 while at a ski lodge in Lake Tahoe:

Dashing through the snow, On a pair of broken skis

O’er the hills we go, Crashing into trees

The Snow is turning red, I think I’m almost dead

I woke up in the hospital with staples in my head, Oh! 

Jingle bells, Jingle bells, Santa’s almost dead!

Rudolph brought an atom bomb and blast it on his head, Oh! 

Barbie doll, Barbie doll, tried to save his life,

But G.I. Joe from Mexico (??) and stabbed him in the head! 

The entire some makes absolutely no sense, grammatically or logically, but it was catchy and as children it was easy to latch onto because American pre-teens have a tendency to want to appear grown-up by pretending to be unfazed by gruesome ideas. Also, the people I was friends with at the age of 10 all spoke English as a second language, so we never noticed how ungrammatical it was until years later. There are in fact other versions of the song with similar violent vibes, but usually only the first verse (before Jingle Bells) is the same. I tried to look up any instances of this that appear in media, but all I found was that this morbid version is actually very widespread.

In December 2014, I heard a few lines from this version of the song while on vacation in Reno, sung by two giggling Chinese-American girls between the ages of 7 and 10. I had always thought that this was something my friend AZ had made up back in 2003, so I tracked him down to find out where he’d heard it.

AZ told me that he had heard it while in art class from GT, who I happen to now know. He was singing the song for attention at the time, but the lyrics he knows were grammatical, as it removes the “and” in the last line, AZ just remembered it wrong when he sang it back. When I asked him where he’d heard it, he only remembered that it was from Minnesota, but no longer remembers the details of who sang it at him and the circumstances under which he learned it.


URL to article: http://folklore.usc.edu/?p=30095