Wednesday, 20th December

Season’s Greetings & a Christmas Song | All the best to all Five Things readers — I’m going to get back into posting more regularly in 2024, promise. In the meantime, a few days out from the 25th, here’s this year’s Christmas song. It’s that old chestnut, “Winter Wonderland”, which was written in 1934 by Felix Bernard and lyricist Richard Bernhard Smith. Smith, a native of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, was inspired to write the lyrics after seeing Honesdale’s Central Park covered in snow while being treated for tuberculosis in the West Mountain Sanitarium in Scranton. Due to its seasonal theme, it is often regarded as a Christmas song. The lyrics are about a couple’s romance during the winter season. A later version, printed in 1947, included a new children’s lyric that transformed it from a romantic winter interlude to a seasonal song about playing in the snow. The snowman mentioned in the song’s bridge was changed from a minister to a circus clown, and the coup

My version kicks off with a 24-year-old Ken Colyer playing “Winter Wonderland” in New Orleans on 24 February 1953, between his stint in the Parish Prison and his deportation from Ellis Island. Ken: “It’s a pleasant pop song from some years back — I remembered it for some reason…” So settle back and hear a blizzard of guitars take you back to Honesdale, Pennsylvania…

Previous Christmas songs…