Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Christmas Dilemma

During lunch at work this week I was quietly studying TIME magazine's article on the 2015 person of the year about Angela Merkel when my boss comes in and asks my thoughts on an important dilemma:  In the song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer what is the echo to the last line, You'll go down in history?  Instantly I knew it was "like the dinosaurs" as I have a knack for random, useless trivia.  He looked at me like I had gone off the deep end.  "Like the dinosaurs? That's not even close, it's Paul Revere.  But someone else is telling me it is either George Washington or Christopher Columbus.  I just can't remember which," he replied.  This puzzled me.  How can there be so many answers that people are so certain of.

Of course whenever I face dilemmas such as this as a good wife I make sure to get my husband's opinion-- "It's George Washington, of course."  Now it was on to Google to find the truth.  My first Google search might have been a little bias since I included "dinosaurs" in the keyword but it came up with a couple of hits.  After watching several version on YouTube, George Washington seemed to be more popular.  Arthur tried to do an ngram search which looks for phrases in books an ranks how frequently they are used each year-- pretty scientific, but it didn't come up with any hits.

We found a few articles suggesting that different parts of the country use different echoes for the song.  Pulling back from info learned during my Research Methods class in grad school (this is probably the only time I have ever put to use anything I learned in this class) I decided to develop a retrospective cohort study.  A retrospective cohort study is when a group of individuals that have a particular trait in common are followed over time to determine an outcome.  Therefore my best cohort would be those who were taught and raised in the same environment so I called my brothers to get their opinions. 

To my surprise my younger brother answered George Washington.  Where in the world did he learn this and how did we know different words to the same song?  I then called my older brother who is very reliable with knowing anything that "might go down in history" since he is a history teacher.  He was a solid supporter of the dinosaurs. We then discussed what caused this difference among our cohort, ie why the youngest brother sings the wrong words.  We discovered that we both had the same elementary music teacher who taught us this song but this teacher retired by the time our young brother was in school.  My older brother is teaching his 3 year old daughter that Rudolph will go down in history like the dinosaurs for the following reasons:

1. Santa and Rudolph don't get old and were around before George Washington but couldn't have possibly been around before the dinosaurs.  (Editor's note:  Christmas creates some weird time space continuum issues such as Rudolph being ageless as his story first appeared in the Montgomery Ward cataolauge in 1939 and then was set to music.  Gene Autry didn't make it a #1 on the charts song until 1949.)

2. He wants to raise his daughter with a global perspectivje and not too American-centric.  It is not very globally minded to think that history only focuses on key American figures like George Washington or Paul Revere.

Arthur here; Alex asked me to provide a counterpoint in favor of George Washington.  First off, Santa is an American cultural icon; the Germans have a separate character named  Weihnachtsman (“Christmas Man”), the Russians have Ded Moroz (“Grandfather Frost”), and the English have Father Christmas.  These are not native names for the same icon, these figures have their own dress, mannerisms, and background story.  This simple point of information is important in refuting Alex's two arguments.

For the first, being an American construct (perhaps more accurately a Coca-Cola construct) I don't think it's too much  of a stretch to put his origin story in a post Industrial Revolution time frame.  I mean, come on, elves might be handy, but there has to be some industrial know how going on there to explain the claimed levels of productivity.

To her second point, as we have already seen, any song featuring Santa Claus is going to be inherently American-centric, so we might as well recognize one of our greatest Founding Fathers.  For the record, Washington ranks sixth in Time's most significant historical figures.  I'll admit, number two on the list (Napolean) has a name that also works well with the syllabic pattern needed for the song, but Washington is a solid choice.

Anyway, petty disputes like these, which we both like to win, are really no barrier to the marital bliss we both enjoy.  Even in the correct wording to a Christmas song, Omnia Vincit Amor.

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