With your permission, kind and patient readers, I’m going to go through some of the lines in excruciating detail: I’m going to speculate (something I rarely do) that there was a history of tuberculosis in Smith’s family otherwise some of the wording makes no sense. They never mention Christmas at all instead, the lyrics describe a young couple in love who are enjoying the beauties of winter but who have a shadow hanging over them. Once we realize Smith’s situation, the words of the song start to make a lot more sense. People might go in and out of sanatoria throughout their lives. If you really loved your loved ones you’d stay away from them, at least until or if your symptoms abated enough that you were considered cured, at least temporarily. So once a person developed the tell-tale signs, including the rather horrifying bloody coughs, the best that could be done was to isolate the patient and subject him or her to a regimen of fresh air, good food, and whatever else was considered healthy at the time. No one knew how to cure it, but it was obvious that it was contagious. At the time that Smith sat in his lonely room the advent of streptomycin was about a decade away, while tuberculosis had been killing people for millennia. We have no real idea of what it was like to live in a world without antibiotics and vaccines. Let me see if I can boil this sad saga down into a reasonable length. A powerful nostalgia was at work here, but, given the actual wording of the song I think there was something else going on: he missed his wife, Jane, whom he’d married in 1930. (He actually won the Maybelline eye shadow contest with the slogan “The Eyes Have It.” Clever!) He could see children playing in the snow outside his window and was reminded of how much he’d enjoyed those same activities when he was growing up in the small town of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. So, back in the winter of 1934, 33-year-old Richard Smith was sitting in his room at the West Mountain Sanitarium after having a recurrence of his TB, trying to keep himself occupied by entering jingle contests for ad copy. Why not? Because he was in a tuberculosis sanitarium. Later the lyrics were changed to a nonsensical Circus Clown replacing the Parson and references to marriage were eliminated.In a word: No. They imagine the snowman asking if the couple is married, to which they tell him that they are not, and tell the snowman that he can marry them. They build a snowman, whom they agree to pretend is Parson Brown. The song's lyrics are about a couple enjoying a picturesque winter landscape. Since its original recording by Richard Himber, it has been covered by over 200 different artists, including Air Supply, Jo Stafford, Doris Day, Andy Williams, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers, Johnny Mathis with Percy Faith and His Orchestra, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Mannheim Steamroller, Amy Grant, Michael Bublé, The Eurythmics, Selena Gomez, Alan Jackson, Radiohead, Snoop Dogg and Elvis Presley. Due to its seasonal theme, it is often regarded as a Christmas song in the Northern Hemisphere. "Winter Wonderland" is a song written in 1934 by Felix Bernard and lyricist Richard Bernhard Smith.
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