"One horse SOAP and sleigh!"

Yep, you read that right. Throughout my childhood, I always thought one of the lyrics to "Jingle Bells" was "one horse soap and sleigh." I never questioned it, just went along my merry juvenile way singing my lil' foolish, gleeful, songbird head off like naïve kids who haven't yet been introduced to the Big Bad Real World do. My parents were no help, they didn't correct me, probably because they thought it was "cute" or something. (Kind of like how I would pronounce "S's" with a lisp which they found adorable, and thus encouraged it, while sending me right into an embarrassing remedial speech therapy class. Thanks, Mom and Dad!) Or maybe they thought those were the lyrics as well,

But I digress. As I grew older, I wondered what a one horse soap and sleigh was. At first, I thought maybe the soap on the sleigh's rails made it slicker in the snow. Then I thought not, for surely the snow would melt off the soap. Then I wondered if maybe EVERYBODY got the lyric wrong and it was supposed to be a "one horse souped up sleigh." Now that made sense. Yet it didn't. I knew the song was old, but it was probably even more ancient than beatnik slang like "souped up."

As the years fell away and my cynicism grew along with my height and awkwardness, I thought that maybe the songwriters were just as sadistic as fairy tale writers and they were hiding a morbid message: the horse would be slayed (most definitely not "sleighed") and turned into soap. Yikes.

Actually I forgot all about it until this Christmas. One groggy morning in bed, I asked my wife, "What does 'one horse soap and sleigh' mean?'"

She gave me her patented crazed look and said "What are you talking about?"

"Um, the song 'Jingle Bells.' There's a one horse soap and sleigh."

Her eyeroll was astronomical. "It's 'one horse open sleigh.'"

I said, "Ohhhhhhhhh," while pretending to have some semblance of dignity and intelligence left.

But my wife's no one to talk. If you were around in the 70's, undoubtedly you guys were throttled by that awful, maudlin Little River Band song, "Lonesome Loser." You know, the song where the groups singing is supposed to be celestial harmonies, but sounds more like a bag of cats thrown into a dog pound? Yeah, that one. For years, my wife thought the song was "Lonesome Lizard." Which makes absolutely no sense, especially for the poor lonesome reptile.

I think everybody has some song in their past where they got the lyrics wrong, A friend of mine who I lived with in college was one day singing along to the stereo. He was bebopping around the apartment, singing at the top of his lungs: "Mid-Summer's Dayyyyyy! Mid-Summer's DAYYYYYYYYYYY!"

I said, "Whoa! What the hell are you singing, Jerry?"

"'Mid-Summer's Day' by Men at Work. Duh."

Well. At least he got the band right. But the song was "It's a Mistake." How he got Mid-Summer's Day out of that is anyone's guess. Yet I made sure I laughed and laughed at him for too long a time.

But I think I'm just deflecting attention from my bonehead decades long Christmas song faux pas.

While on the topic of boneheads, it takes one to write one, I guess, and characters don't come any more boneheaded than one of the two leads in my Zach and Zora comical murder mystery series. You see, Zach is a male stripper (he prefers "male entertainment dancer") who constantly stumbles over dead bodies and is blamed for the murders by making really dumb life choices. It's up to his (usually pregnant and highly irritable) sleuth sister, Zora, to find the real killer and save her dumb brother's neck. Join the fun with the first book, Bad Day in a Banana Hammock!