They are, appropriately enough, the first sound you hear in Sinatra’s “Jingle Bells” cover. They carry us through Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride,” and they add some sparkle after Mariah Carey’s intro in “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Holiday classics, all, with a sound that leans on an unmistakable musical element.
Bright, jingling, sleigh bells.
This holiday connection, though, is fairly new, and mostly the result of the power of music.
Briefest of Backgrounds
While jingle-style bells go way back and were used in ceremonies and entertainment around the world, it’s not until the European Middle Ages when we start to see the ancestor to the modern sleigh bell. These crotal bells were used to keep track of livestock, worn on clothes, and most importantly for our purposes here, attached to wagons, sleds and sleighs.
“Silent Sleigh Strikes Straggler! News at 11.”
Now, close your eyes for a second or two and imagine yourself strolling down a quiet, snowy trail. It’s just you, and the crunch of snow with every step. Until, WHAM!
You’ve been struck by a passing sleigh, the sound of horse hooves and sled runners muffled by the snow all around.
Enter the sleigh bell, as a noisy safety device. The sounds of sleigh bells on passing sleighs and carts alerted friends and neighbors to their presence (and, I imagine, cut down drastically on the expense of sleigh dent removal).
In the era before the automobile, the jingle-jangle of horse-drawn bells became so common that eventually the sleigh bell would find its way into the realm of music as shorthand, for a very merry… winter.
Not quite Christmas, but we’re dashing through the snow, at least.
Classically Jingled
The Mozarts (Leopold and Wolfgang, natch) provide a couple of great examples of sleigh bells making the leap to musical mood-setting.
Leopold Mozart’s Musical Sleigh Ride is one of the earliest depictions in classical music of winter fun. His use of sleigh bells here (along with whip cracks, wood blocks and barking orchestra members) helps set the scene for a contemporary audience intimately familiar with the sounds of travel by one-horse open sleigh. And oh, what fun it is!
The other Mozart, Wolfgang, later used sleigh bells to imply a winter sleigh ride in his German Dance No 3, “Sleigh Ride”.
In fact, throughout the classical world, with a few exceptions, sleigh bells were a convenient shortcut to convey the idea of winter through sleigh-ride imagery. From the Mozarts’ sleigh adventures, to Frederick Delius’ Sleigh Ride…
…sleigh bells in music tell the story of dashing through the snow. A seasonal connection, and not much more.
“So why do I hear Christmas, smartie?”
I suppose you can thank Santa Claus for that gift.
Although Santa has a long history of gift-giving, it’s not really until the 1821 publication of an anonymous poem, called “Old Santeclaus with Much Delight,” that Santa’s reindeer-driven sleigh enters the pop culture scene. That merry, jingling image is reinforced a couple of years later in Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (often known simply as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”).
These poems helped launch the first American Christmas songs specifically about Santa, like Benjamin Hanby’s 1864 classic “Up on the Housetop,” and “Jolly Old St. Nicholas,” published in 1865, and based on a poem by Emily Huntington Miller.
While these songs didn’t originally include sleigh bells, this new, popular take on Santa and his sleigh helped to pull sleighs firmly out of the world of pure transportation and into the world of Christmas imagery. And if there are sleighs, there must be sleigh bells…
Jing-a-ling-a-ling, baby!
Yes, non-Christmas sleigh rides were still popping up in classical music after the turn of the century, despite Santa’s magic. At about the same time, both Sergei Prokofiev and Leroy Anderson were working on their own rides.
But the merry damage was done. In 1947, Gene Autry added some jingling sleigh bells behind the vocals of his hit “Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane).”
Autry wasn’t the only one, though. The mid-20th Century holiday music scene exploded with bells.
Bing Crosby opened his 1951 hit “It’s Beginning to Look Like Christmas” with jingling sleigh bells as shorthand of his own.
Sleigh bells jingle faintly in the back of Burl Ives’ “A Holly Jolly Christmas.”
And they help keep the rhythm of Andy Wililams’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (They even make it into the lyrics. Listen for it.).
By the time the 1970s and ‘80s rolled around, you almost couldn’t have a Christmas hit without sleigh bells. Just ask Paul McCartney.
Or ask Run-D.M.C. Their 1987 single “Christmas in Hollis” might be sleigh bells at their peak.
But the bells have persisted Christmas after Christmas. From Mariah Carey’s mega-hit “All I want for Christmas is You,” to Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me” and beyond, sleigh bells continue to drive home the Christmas connection.
Maybe, if we still rode in sleighs rather than cars, the evolution of the sleigh bell from sheep-finder to safety device would have stopped there. But instead, composers and musicians have kept the sleigh bell alive. First, as a stand-in for winter sleigh rides on the concert stage, then as shorthand for the arrival of a sleigh-riding Santa Claus, and finally as an icon of the season itself, as memorable as mistletoe, twinkling lights, and stockings hung by the chimney with care.
