After singing “Troll the ancient yuletide carol” at school yesterday, I pictured a small group of trolls going door-to-door, angrily singing holiday songs in their scratchy troll voices, smiling through their disgusting troll teeth, making a bid to undermine their cute cousins the elves in a historic reversal of the grand Christmas myth-making experience.

I thought it was a typo –that it was supposed to be “toll”, like the tolling of a bell– and that’s what I told the students. Then I looked it up at home and my book of Christmas songs said “troll” also. WTF? So I checked Webster’s, and sure enough, there it was: v.t. troll – to sing in a loud, carefree way. I was wrong. It happens.

I suppose I had not noticed the word before because we’re so used to turning off our brains when we sing Christmas carols. With these old songs, we don’t always know what we’re singing. We just sing it. We enjoy the company of other voices at least once a year, not worrying a bit about how troll-like our own voice sounds. We also use archaic or otherwise difficult language that, during the other eleven months of the year, we have no use for.

Which leads me to part two of today’s post: a minor, incomplete, informal glossary of terms that we seldom use anymore, from a carol that we sing all the time.

Deck the Halls is full of them, since it’s from the Old Welsh:

First, the title phrase – “deck the halls with boughs of holly” – with deck being a synonym for decorate (not a WWE wrestling move), and boughs being an archaic term for branches (see also the old lullabye Rock a Bye Baby, where it’s “When the bough breaks…”).

“Don we now our gay apparel” – here don refers to the act of putting on clothes(whether or not your name is Don… in fact many Dons prefer no clothing at all), and gay is a synonym for colorful and carefree… which may explain somewhat the modern adoption of the term by homosexuals. The word slowly acquired a second, sexual connotation beginning in the 1700s (sexually carefree & loose), and in the 1920s writers like Gertrude Stein and Noel Coward started slyly using it to refer to sexual orientation.

And here’s a fun, “gay” fact about one of my fave films ever, lifted direct from wiki:

•  Bringing Up Baby (1938) was the first film to use the word gay in apparent reference to homosexuality. In a scene where Cary Grant’s clothes have been sent to the cleaners, he must wear a lady’s feathery robe. When another character inquires about his clothes, he responds “Because I just went gay…all of a sudden!”^[4] …There is much debate about what Grant meant with the ad-lib (the line was not in the script).

“Troll the ancient yuletide carol” – for troll, see above… followed by yuletide, with yule- referring to a pre-Christian (aka pagan) winter festival, and -tide referring (I think… since I’m having little luck finding an online definition and I’m too lazy to go find a real reference book) to the wave-like ebb and flow of seasons.

Verse 2 begins “See the blazing yule before us”, which refers to the Christmas tradition of burning a yule log (not to a pyromaniac’s fantasy of setting the whole festival on fire). Yule logs have some vague connection to the Norse god Thor, but we won’t go there.

I may look at goofy words from some other carols later in the week. But right now, this has taken too long, and there is a small child in the next room, patiently waiting to make troll-shaped sugar cookies with me.

“Oh what fun, it is to bake, an ugly troll today… HEY!”

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Two Carols: Oriental, and Merry But Not So Gentle
• Danger in a Manger
• Christmas Carols: A Brief History
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