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My mind has been utterly blown this Boxing Boxing Day. I saw a cartoon about the three kings being criticised for moving around during lockdown which used the phrase "traverse afar". Was this some kind of pun? Or had the cartoonist gone mad? We all know the lyrics to We Three Kings are "We three kings of Orient are.
Bearing gifts we travel so far."
I know this better than anyone because I was the Frankincense king at primary school when I was 8. And even if I had learned the song without reading it (but I could read by then) then I have sung the song many times over the last half a century. I would have had the words in front of me and surely noticed this weird fucking phrase that doesn't even make sense (you traverse something, you can't traverse afar)
The lyrics of the hymn are all over the place and John Henry Hopkins Jr is a fucking idiot. It's clunky from the start "We three kings of Orient, are"????
It's odd for the first line of a song to have tortuous grammar in order to get a rhyme. You can make the first line anything you want. It feels like he really wanted to call them kings from the Orient and then realised there was no rhyme for Orient, but wasn't going to let that get in his way.
"We, three kings, have followed a star
Bearing gifts we've travelled quite far" would be my punt.
Or how about "We three kings who come from the east,
of all our gifts myrrh is the least.
We have certainly done a lot of traversing,
the one with the gold has really been cursing"
Richard Osman then blew my mind a little bit by letting me know it's "God rest ye merry, Gentlemen" so the rest is merry not the gentlemen and also it's "Jingle, bells" - a command to bells rather than a type of bell. I have lived my life in a haze of lies.
There was also a healthy Twitter discussion about all the alternate lyrics for this (and other carols) so we don't need to get into all that again.
Turkey fajitas for lunch (the best meal yet) but even though there is some turkey left we didn't have it for dinner. We tried to get through some of the cheese we'd bought for the cheese board instead. Half the guests and twice the meals.
