The 25 Days of Christmas: Day 12

You can sing this one yourself.

I was talking to my nine-year-old son about Christmas music recently. “When I was a kid,” I told him, “we used to sing, ‘Jingle bells, Batman smells...’”

He immediately joined in with “Robin laid an egg,” which I’m sure you did as well just now. We had a good laugh, but I kept thinking about it. How fascinating that this bit of oral tradition is going strong today, forty-plus years after I learned it. Adults don’t teach kids this song—some schoolkid in the 60s made it up and taught it to someone a little younger, and they told someone younger, and so on, and now I’m laughing about it with my boy on the way to school in 2023. Marvelous.

Today’s song is “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” and posting a video of it would defeat the point. Sing it yourself, because you definitely know the words.

AI image result for “Jingle bells, Batman smells.” That car must have skidded in sideways, over the mailbox/lamp/whatever; there’s no snow on the car so it just arrived, but the only tire tracks are to its side. Batman and the other dude have either been standing there since before the snow fell or flew in to avoid leaving tracks.

On the subject of things everyone knows:

This summer we took a family trip to France. One highlight of the trip came during our too-brief stay at Capestang, which serendipitously coincided with the annual Fête de la Musique. At the music festival on the town square our son (who speaks no French) met some French kids (who spoke no English), and within about ten seconds they were all playing Tag together. It was delightful to see, and as we walked back to our little canal boat afterward, we discussed the fact that every person on Earth knows the rules of Tag. Playing Tag is built into us, presumably a remnant from the days when being a good hunter meant the difference between eating and starving, and Tag would have been “practice hunting” for the little ones.

So much of humanity’s past is built into the things we choose to pass on to new humans. Consider: Every kid knows about elephants, but not every kid knows about vicuñas. There is a certain set of animals we think it’s important for children to know about. The animals that show up frequently in books, toys, cartoons, stuffed animals, etc.—especially those intended for very young children—fall broadly into three main groups:

• African animals (lions, elephants, zebras, hippos);

• Farm animals (cows, horses, chickens, pigs); and

• Domestic pets (dogs, cats, fish).

I’m painting with a broad brush and obviously there are exceptions (tiger, polar bear), but these seem to be the three main groups, and they align with the animals that children would encounter at three grand stages of human development: Our earliest days in Africa; the agricultural revolution, when most people started living on farms; and “modern” life, when most of the animals that children encounter are pets. Very interesting stuff.

It’s always refreshing, somehow, to be reminded that operations like oral tradition and cultural memory are happening around us all the time.

And now, sing it with me:

Jingle Bells, Batman smells,
Robin laid an egg.
The Batmobile lost a wheel
And the Joker got away, Hey!

Notes:

• Robert Evans of Cracked.com dug into the history of “Jingle bells, Batman smells” back in 2015, and some of it gets pretty dark.

• My son and/or his classmates have mashed up several altered versions of “Jingle Bells.” He follows the Joker’s escape with an altered (and apparently unrelated) chorus and verse:
  
  Dashing through the snow,
  On a pair of broken skis,
  Over the hills we go,
  Crashing through the trees.
  The snow is turning red,
  I think I might be dead,
  I wake up in the hospital with stitches in my head!
  
  911, 911, someone call the cops!
  Take me to the hospital and
  Feed me lollipops!