"’Tis the season"? Bah, humbug!
An inescapable cliché and the story of its origin.
It is with a heavy heart that I resurrect an old grievance, one I’d hoped never to write about again. I refer to that most tedious and overworked of holiday clichés, ’Tis the season.
Your eyes do not deceive you. It’s everywhere.
I kvetched repeatedly about the ’tis-the-season curse on my previous blog (read ’em and weep), and hoped never to visit the subject again. I dreamed that copywriters throughout the land would miraculously see the error of their ways and heed the thunderous proscription of Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre:
“’Tis the season”: Not in copy, not in headlines, not at all. Never, never, never, never, never. You cannot make this fresh. Do not attempt it.
Alas, ’twas not to be. Not in copy, not in headlines, not in ads, not in social media. And definitely not in emails: As I write this, my inbox is brimming with ’tis-the-seasons.
From Bed Bath & Beyond1 : ’Tis the season for decorating. From Sonic Internet: ’Tis the season to get three months free. From Icebreaker: ’Tis the season to stock up on base layers. From Tivoli Audio: ’Tis the season for gifting.
And on and on.
And don’t expect it to go away in January, because ’tis the season is a year-round phenomenon now. I received a “’Tis the season to gobble, gather, and glow” email on October 31. Yelp informed me on July 7 that “tis’ the season to do something new” — yes, they put the apostrophe after the Tis. (Reminder: The apostrophe in ’tis replaces the first “i” in “it is.” Or used to, when people actually said ‘tis and ‘twas.) Carbon Health also favors the Tis’ spelling, and sends Tis’ [sic] the season emails whenever it wants to remind me about, say, sports physicals — on August 29, for instance.
I have tried without success to understand why this one anachronistic phrase has taken hold of writers-for-hire. Has a great ennui overtaken the copywriting profession? Is the endless repetition of ’tis the season intended to be comforting, like another old ornament brought down from the attic to festoon a Christmas tree? Does originality count for nothing?
I can’t answer those questions, so instead I will bring you the story of “Deck the Hall(s),” the Christmas carol that gave us ’tis the season.
The melody for what we now know as “Deck the Halls” is Welsh, and dates back to the sixteenth century. It was called “Nos Galan,” which translates to “night of the first day,” aka New Year’s Eve — it wasn’t a Christmas song at all. The Welsh lyrics transcribed in 1784 had a distinctly under-the-mistletoe flavor:
O mor gynnes mynwes meinwen, fal lal &c
O mor fwyn yw llwyn Meillionen; fal lal &c
O mor felus yw’r cusanau,
Gyda serch a mwynion eiriau, fal lal &c
Which translates to
Oh! how warm my sweetheart’s bosom
Oh! how sweet a clover grove is
Oh! how sweet are the kisses
With affection and tender words.
(Source: Fiona Potts’s deeply researched post on her blog Handy Finch.)
When English lyrics were finally published, in 1862, the first stanza had taken a familiar form, but with singular “hall”:
Deck the hall with boughs of holly
Fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!
’Tis the season to be jolly:
Fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!
The next line, though, took a bibulous turn. Where we now “don our gay apparel,” the original verse commanded us to
Fill the meadcup, drain the barrel
And where we now “see the blazing yule before us,” our jollier nineteenth-century counterparts saw “the flowing bowl”; they sang of “beauty’s treasure” instead of “Christmas treasure” and merrily endorsed “laughing, quaffing all together.” Bottoms up!
Welsh lyrics were also published in 1862, alongside the English ones. They’re less amorous than the earlier versions but a little bit boozy:
Goreu pleser ar nos galan,
Tŷ a thân a theulu diddan,
Calon lân a chwrw melyn,
Pennill mwyn a llais y delyn,The best pleasure on new year's eve,
Is house and fire and a pleasant family,
A pure heart and blonde ale,
A gentle song and the voice of the harp
Yes, “Deck the Hall” — like “The Star-Spangled Banner” — was a drinking song. Does this knowledge make me more kindly disposed toward all the relentless ’tis-the-seasoning in AdLand? More likely to be, you know, jolly? Actually, it does not. But at least I can now mutter “Oh how sweet a clover grove is” to drown out the chorus.
Bankrupt, yes, but Overstock.com acquired BB&B’s intellectual property, so it survives online as “a bigger, better Beyond.”
I console myself by singing the deathless "Pogo" version, where the line becomes “Nora’s freezing on the trolley.”
I saw it in an email from Simon & Schuster. There's no hope!