Brenda Lee was 13 when she recorded “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” back in 1958. That’s kind of wild, in part because her voice does not sound like the voice of a 13-year-old and in part because 13 is, like, very young to do anything. It’s also wild because the song was written by the same dude who wrote “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in 1949 and “Holly Jolly Christmas” in 1962, which is a heck of a decade-plus Christmas heater. His name was Johnny Marks. Johnny Marks would also be a cool name for like a pool hustler or guy who hangs around a horse track a lot. Maybe that’s what this Johnny Marks was up to when he wasn’t cranking out holiday bangers. Let’s just go ahead and pretend that one is true.
Brenda Lee is still alive today. She 78 and looks like she’s doing great. This November, she released a new music video for the song, which resulted in it rocketing back up to number one on the Billboard 100 earlier this week, in 2023, a full 65 years after it was originally released. It’s funny to think about that just from a passage of time perspective. If you go back 65 years before she recorded it as a 13-year-old in 1958, to 1893, America still had only 44 states. We were still short Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii. John Philip Sousa was the most popular musical artist of the day. Babe Ruth hadn’t even been born yet. I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia this week.
Anyway, here’s Brenda, doing great.
The other nice thing about all of this is that it gives me a great excuse to point out one of my favorite holiday-related things, which is that it really does kind of sound like Brenda Lee says the f-word in this song. It’s the kind of thing you can never unhear once someone points it out to you and it brings me more happiness than you can possibly imagine to be the one to point it out to people.
It happens early on in the song, in the second verse, which starts around the 0:20 mark of that video up there, where she sings this…
Rockin' around the Christmas tree
Let the Christmas spirit ring
Later we'll have some pumpkin pie
And we'll do some caroling
Did you hear it? Did you hear her say “Later we’ll have some fuckin’ pie”? Go back and listen to it again if you didn’t. You will this time. And every time you hear it for the rest of your life. I’m very sorry but also you are very welcome.
I’ve been doing this for over two decades now, pointing out the misheard profanity in this song to people, both in real life and on the internet. I get people reaching out to me about it every year. I usually get a text from my mom in late November that says “i just heard my first fuckin pie!” which is a really fun thing to explain to anyone who sees the text pop up on my phone with no other context. The whole thing might be my favorite Christmas tradition. I am barely joking.
Two notes in closing:
To get the full image here, I recommend picturing a frazzled mom at the holidays, just fried with shopping and school plays and two bratty kids who want to know when dessert will be ready, and she just wants FIVE MINUTES to relax and have A NICE CHRISTMAS for ONCE and she finally snaps and shouts “LATER WE’LL HAVE SOME FUCKIN’ PIE AND WE’LL DO SOME CAROLING”
If you are anything like me, you will have a lot of fun explaining this to people every time the song comes on for the rest of your entire life
Merry Christmas, guys.
STUFF I TYPED
— as I promised last week, the Uproxx staff got heavy into our Best of 2023 lists, with contributions from me for both TV and movies
— Juno Temple went full Kevin McAllister on Fargo this week and I have the GIFs to prove it
— my weekly Rundown column, which is mostly a plea/demand for Tom Cruise to send me one of his famous holiday cakes, and which is extra funny to me because I joked about wanting Guy Fieri’s Spiked Fruit Punch in a Rundown a few weeks ago and this showed up at my door less than an hour after this week’s column went live
STUFF I CLICKED ON
— Mike Ryan interviewed Nicolas Cage and got a big scoop and I’m so jealous about it I could puke
— Jessica Toomer bangs a drum I have been thumping on for many years about how movies are too long now
— I must know everything about the friendship between Vin Diesel and Rita Moreno
— here’s a good ornament a nice person named Dawn showed me
— I reread Lindy West’s brutal deconstruction of Love Actually from 10 years ago and it still rules
— LOOK AT THE BABY RHINO
— my parents went to New Orleans last week and ate at a restaurant called Peche and I have looked at the menu maybe 500 times since then
— there’s another dude out there named Brian Grubb who is a world-famous extreme athlete and does things like wakeskate into a BASE jump off a skyscraper in Dubai, which is really very silly to me because the fact that I’m in a wheelchair is about fourth on the list of reasons I do not do things like that
— penguins take thousands of little mini-naps every day, which is cool
Okay, that’s enough. Have a nice week.
I will accept that people don’t hear an F bomb in a Christmas song, but there’s no reality in which the word she says is pumpkin.
Maybe I’ve gone soft, but I don’t understand being that angry at Love, Actually. Pulling up Muppet Christmas Carol and not watching something you don’t like has never been easier. Just seems exhausting to be that mad.
If there was a massive uptick I missed of British guys going to Wisconsin to bang January Jones and/or dudes holding cue cards up for their best friend’s wives, I retract my prior statement and plead ignorance