Hey, you're singing that Christmas carol wrong!

It’s happened to all of us: You’ll be signing along with a Christmas carol on the radio, when suddenly they sing the wrong words — at least not the words you learned!

This isn’t a case of misheard lyrics. It’s not Jimi Hendrix sounding like he’s saying, “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy.” (Spoiler alert: He’s really saying “kiss the sky.”) These lyrics really are different. Somewhere along the line, someone changed them, and they stopped you in your tracks, and left you wondering what in the winter wonderland happened.

I’m not talking about changing the lyrics entirely, as in “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg.” Or in the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s beautiful re-imagining of “The Holly and the Ivy” as “The Prince of Peace.”

But sometimes, the whole song is different, and you’re not sure which lyrics will be sung until the moment of truth. You open your mouth to sing, “O come, all ye faithful,” and the singer starts belting out the Latin version.

Similarly, you might have learned “O Christmas Tree” instead of the German version, “O Tannenbaum.” (As a child, I assumed they were singing, “O Cannon Bomb!” And yes, that was a misheard lyric. I also thought “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing!” was “Hark the Harold!” — like “turn on the Telly” or “go to the John.” And to my young ears, “Don we now our gay apparel” came through as “Don, we now are gay! Apparel!)

Usually, however, it’s not that extreme.

“Winter Wonderland’s” a good place to start. In the original version, the singers build a snowman “and pretend that he is Parson Brown.” But for some reason, in 1953, poor Parson Brown was replaced by “a circus clown.” The next two lines change, too. Gone is any reference to the good parson performing a marriage ceremony. It’s been replaced with this:

We’ll have lots of fun with Mr. Snowman

Until the other kiddies knock him down

Was this because no one knew who the good parson was? Did he think he was being defamed and file a cease-and-desist order? Or was this just a case of making the song more “kid friendly” by substituting an assault on the defenseless snowman for a marriage proposal? Which implies sex. Which, as everyone knows, is far more objectionable than violence.

Right.

Bing Crosby’s version below splits the difference by including both lyrics.

“I’ll Be Home for Christmas” contains two minor variations, but they’re confounding because they both seem just about equally common. You never know which one they’re gonna sing! Is it, “you can plan on me” from the original Bing Crosby version, or “you can count on me” from Johnny Mathis’ popular cover? It’s not hard to tell the difference between those two voices, but the problem is, other singers have covered them both. So are you going to mess this up? Count on it. Or plan on it. Your choice.

But hold on, there’s more: Some singers refer to presents on the tree, while others insist they’ll be under the tree. The only way to tell the difference, I suppose, is whether the singer has bought his kids a sock puppet or a Radio Flyer for Christmas. You can’t very well put a red wagon on a tree without knocking it down.

Then again, if they put their presents in stockings, the entire song makes zero sense.

Then there’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which started out as a real downer. It was written for the 1944 Judy Garland vehicle, Meet Me in St. Louis. It started out almost like a funeral dirge:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

It may be your last

Next year we may all be living in the past

 Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Pop that champagne cork

Next year we may all be living in New York

No good times like the olden days

Happy golden days of yore

Faithful friends who were dear to us

Will be near to us no more

 But at least we all will be together

If the Lord allows

From now on, we'll have to muddle through somehow

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

The lyrics were so dismal that Garland refused to sing them, and they had to be rewritten.

Instead of warning that “it may be your last,” the new version urged listeners to “let your heart be light” because “next year all our troubles will be out of sight.” It exhorted them to “make the Yuletide Gay,” eliminating the references to champagne corks and the swipe at New York .

(Besides, singing “pop that champagne cork” to a little girl, who shares the scene with Garland in the movie, just wouldn’t have worked.)

But even the movie version contained a line that might not sound familiar: The reference to
muddling through somehow, was dropped in favor of “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough” — at the insistence of Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra had already recorded the “muddled” version of the tune for his 1948 album, Christmas Songs By Sinatra, but when he wanted to cover it again nine years later, he changed the line because the original didn’t fit with the album’s title, A Jolly Christmas.

In fact, there are so many variations on this particular song that it’s almost impossible to predict how anyone’s gonna sing it. Will all our troubles be miles away “next year” or “someday/from now on?” And those faithful friends: Were they or are they dear to us? Is it “will be” near to us or “gather” near to us.

The moral to this story: If you’re going Christmas caroling, print out whatever lyrics you plan to use, so that everyone’s on the same page.

Then you’ll all be in harmony. You can count (or plan) on it.