‘Jingle Bells’ Wasn’t Written as a Christmas Song. Here’s the Real History

Claim:

The popular holiday tune “Jingle Bells” was not written as a Christmas song.

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For years, social media users have claimed that the classic holiday tune “Jingle Bells” was not originally written as a Christmas song. Examples of the claim have appeared in posts on X (archived), Reddit (archived), and Facebook (archived), as well as in numerous books and magazines.

(X user @ThatEricAlper)

It’s true that “Jingle Bells” songwriter James Pierpont did not have Christmas in mind when he penned the tune — which does not mention the holiday in its lyrics — in the 1850s. However, widespread claims that Pierpont wrote the song in honor of Thanksgiving or for a Sunday school choir are not grounded in concrete evidence, as we noted when we first looked into the claim in 2014.

Since then, a different explanation backed up by demonstrable primary sources has emerged. In 2017, a theater historian identified an archival document showing that the song’s first performance was in fact part of an 1857 minstrel show in Boston. In the 19th and early-20th centuries, minstrel theater was a type of popular entertainment based on stereotyped depictions of Black Americans that featured white actors in blackface.

The discovery, published in the peer-reviewed journal Theatre Survey, was the work of Kyna Hamill, who received a Ph.D. in theater history from Tufts University and now works at Boston University.

In short, Hamill found a playbill in the Harvard Theater Collection at Harvard University’s Houghton Library showing that the first attested performance of “One Horse Open Sleigh” — the original title of the song, which Pierpont renamed “Jingle Bells” in 1859 — took place on Sept. 15, 1857, at Ordway Hall, a prominent minstrel theater in Boston. The singer who performed it was Johnny Pell, a minstrel actor notable enough to have his own posthumous entry in the 1911 directory “Monarchs of Minstrelsy.”

Further evidence that the song Pell performed was the same one we now know as “Jingle Bells” can be found on the cover of the song’s original 1857 sheet music, which Pierpont dedicated to the venue’s owner, John P. Ordway.

(Library of Congress)

The song, Hamill realized in the course of her research, was just one of many similar songs about sleigh rides written for northern minstrel performances in the 1840s and 1850s — some of which were more overtly racist than the song now known as “Jingle Bells.” As Hamill wrote in her Theatre Survey article, such songs commonly featured “tintinnabulation [a bell-like ringing or tinkling sound], fast sleighs, pretty girls, an upset, and an imperative to sing about the whole event.”

Hamill began looking into the history of “Jingle Bells” in 2015, several years after she first began volunteering at the Medford Historical Society & Museum in Medford, Massachusetts, where Pierpont spent much of his life and where a local building bears a historical plaque identifying it as the birthplace of “Jingle Bells.”

Around the holidays every year, Hamill said over email, the historical society received a flood of calls and emails from Medford residents and visitors asking for information about the song’s history. Eventually, Hamill became so curious about the discrepancies between the song’s various origin stories that she began to conduct her own archival research.

‘Jingle Bells’ Myths

As for the popular origin stories about the song, they appear to have circulated in the form of unsubstantiated claims repeated in newspaper articles and books for decades before the advent of social media.

The claim that Pierpont wrote the song for a Sunday school concert appeared in various articles and books starting in the 1970s, without reference to any evidence.

The Thanksgiving claim appears to have begun to circulate by the mid-1980s, when a question about the origin of “Jingle Bells” included in a syndicated Christmas-themed quiz published in numerous different papers had the answer: “‘Jingle Bells’ was written for Thanksgiving by James Pierpont in 1857.” There is no demonstrable evidence to support the claim that the song ever had anything to do with Thanksgiving — which was not a federal holiday until 1863, although some states, including Massachusetts, did celebrate it before then.

As for the location where Pierpont wrote the song, Hamill told BU Today that she believes it was neither Medford nor Savannah, Georgia — the other city that has laid claim to being the song’s birthplace. Instead, based on the timing of the first performance, Hamill said she suspects Pierpont wrote the song in the Boston boardinghouse where he lived just before he moved to Savannah in the fall of 1857.

The Medford claim, Hamill believes, was largely based on a Boston Globe article published in 1946, nearly a century after Pierpont wrote the song. The paper’s only source for the claim that “Jingle Bells” originated in the building that now bears the plaque identifying it as the song’s birthplace was a grandniece of a woman who once lived in the building — hardly an eyewitness account.

Ultimately, out of all of the various origin stories for “Jingle Bells,” the only one grounded in actual primary sources dating to Pierpont’s lifetime is the one Hamill pieced together through her research.

In other words, the best available evidence for the song’s first performance shows that Pierpont originally wrote “Jingle Bells” as a minstrel song satirizing Black participation in a common northern winter activity — not as a Christmas song, but also not as a Thanksgiving song or for a Sunday school choir’s concert.

We’ve previously investigated claims related to other classic holiday songs, including the assertion that “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is an example of the Mandela effect and the rumor that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is about date rape.

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