Tales of Christmas Past -- Real Ones

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December 25, 1000: The Kingdom of Hungary is founded by King Stephen I.

December 25, 1013: Sweyn Forkbeard, King of Denmark, having invaded England in August, is declared King in London. But he dies, apparently not due to assassination, the following February 3. His son and grandson continued to rule as Danish Kings of England until 1042, at which point Edward the Confessor, the son of the King Sweyn overthrew, Aethelred the Unready, is proclaimed King. 

December 25, 1065: Westminster Abbey is consecrated in London. But Edward the Confessor, who ordered and funded its building, is too ill to attend, and dies the following January 5. Which leads us to…

December 25, 1066: William, Duke of Normandy, a.k.a. William the Bastard and William the Conqueror, is crowned King William I of England at Westminster Abbey.

As the saying goes, never go into battle against a man called "the Bastard," because he's probably got a chip on his shoulder. And never go into battle against a man called "the Conqueror," because, chances are, he earned that nickname.

December 25, 1184: In Santa Claus, A Biography, historian Gerry Bowler notes that the Yule Log was one of the most widespread Christmas traditions in early modern Europe, with the first recording of its appearance dating to this time.

Bowler notes that the tradition's roots are debated -- some saying it is an "enfeebled version of the ancient Celtic human sacrifices" and others saying it's simply related to a feudal obligation of acquiring firewood.

Nevertheless, the log was a huge block, lasting for the Twelve Days of Christmas, and it was not burned completely its first year: Part of it was saved to light the following year's Yule Log. While the mostly burned wood waited for its duty to light a new Yule Log, it was kept around the house to ward off a range of misfortunes, including toothaches, mildew, lightning, house fires, hail and chilblains (an inflammation of small blood vessels brought on from exposure to cold).

December 25, 1492: La Santa María de la Inmaculada Concepción -- The Holy Mary of the Immaculate Conception -- runs aground in what's now Cap-Haïtien, Haiti. 

Seeing that his flagship is irretrievably damaged, Christopher Columbus orders his men to strip the timbers from the ship. The timbers were later used to build a fort which Columbus called La Navidad (Nativity, or Christmas), at Limonade. Today, it is part of Université D'Etat D'Haiti, Campus Roi Henri Christophe.

Despite several claims over the last 500 years or so, the wreck of the Santa María has never been found. The Pinta would also be wrecked on the return voyage. The Niña made it back to Spain, and made a trading voyage to Venezuela in 1501, but nothing further is recorded of her.

December 25, 1526: King Henry VIII orders that the main course of his Christmas feast be not a goose, which was traditional in England, but a turkey, a bird first brought from America to England that year. The 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII, with Charles Laughton in the title role, popularized the image of the Tudor monarch as a fat old guy gorging himself, with a turkey leg in his hand, even though he would have been just 35 at this point.

Turkeys became popular feast meals in England because they didn't have the usefulness of traditional English livestock: Cows for milk, chickens for eggs, sheep for wool. But up until the 1950s, a goose remained the traditional bird for the Christmas feast. A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, had Ebenezer Scrooge include as part of his redemption the ordering of the biggest goose in a butcher shop to be sent to the Crachit family. There's also an old song, going back at least as far as Dickens' time:

Christmas is coming.
The goose is getting fat.
Please to put a penny
in an old man's hat.
If you have no penny
a ha'penny (half-penny) will do.
If you have no ha'penny
then God bless you!

Other countries have their variations on Christmas dinner. Some English-speaking countries serve ham, which is also popular (as "hamón") in Spanish-speaking countries, including Mexico and the Philippines. Some use chicken, including India, and the Japanese began a tradition of going to Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas Day in the 1970s. Northern Italy uses poultry, while Southern Italy uses lamb or fish.

In Eastern Europe, including Poland (where the meal is held on Christmas Eve and is known as Wigilia, "vigil") and Austria, fried fish is often the meal of choice. Seafood is also common in French-speaking places, including Québec and New Orleans: The meal is called réveillon, or "waking," because you stay awake until midnight on Christmas Eve, and then the meal is served after midnight, when it's the 25th. Portuguese-speaking places, including Brazil, also tend to use fish.

And in Britain, the meal ends with a pudding -- but it's not what Americans call "pudding," be it chocolate, rice or tapioca. Whether black pudding, white pudding, Yorkshire pudding, bread pudding, blood pudding, or, celebrated in song, figgy pudding, it's a cake -- often recognizable to Americans as a "fruitcake."

And if you don't like fruitcake -- especially if you remember Johnny Carson's joke that there is only one fruitcake, and it gets eternally passed around -- well, do what I did when confronted as an adult with that other English classic, fish and chips: Presume that you didn't like it as a child because you'd never had it prepared and served the right way, and find someplace that does it the right way, and try it. You'll like it.

December 25, 1553: The Battle of Tucapel is fought outside the town of that name in what is now the South American nation of Chile. Mapuche rebels under Lautaro defeat the Spanish Conquistadors, and execute the Spanish Governor, Pedro de Valdivia.

This was part of the Arauco War, one of the longest wars in history, fought sporadically between 1546 and 1662. Lautaro himself did not enjoy his victory for long, as a Spanish ambush killed him in 1557. The Mapuches would launch another attack on the ruling Spanish on December 25, 1766, but this would also end up failing. Chile would not become independent until 1818.

December 25, 1559: Giovanni Angelo Medici, Archbisho of Ragusa and a member of the owerful House of Medici, is elected Pope, succeeding the late Paul IV. He takes the name Pius IV. He reigns until his death in 1565.

December 25, 1576: The earliest known firmly dated representation of a Christmas tree is on a sculpture at a home in Turckheim, Alsace, then part of Germany, but since 1918 part of France.

It may go back further than that. Martin Luther, who reached the height of his fame in the early 1520s, is said to have placed lit candles on an evergreen tree. This is not recommended. However, the tree's supposed German origins led to the best-known song about Christmas trees, "O Tannenbaum."

Tinsel has long been associated with Christmas trees. It used to be made out of lead, since it didn't tarnish like other metals. Of course, we now know that using lead for anything except pipes is a bad idea.

December 25, 1584: Princess Margaret of Austria is born in Graz, later to be the hometown of Arnold Schwarzenegger. She married King Philip III of Spain, and was thus Queen of Spain from 1598 until her death in 1611, from complications of childbirth, her 8th.

She was the mother of King Philip IV of Spain, Anne of Austria (later Queen of France under King Louis XIII, and mother of King Louis XIV), and Maria Anna of Spain (later Empress of Emperor Ferdinand III of the Holy Roman Empire).

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December 25, 1620, 400 years ago: The Plymouth Pilgrims spend their 1st Christmas Day in the New World building their 1st structure in the New World, thus demonstrating their complete contempt for celebrating the birth of Jesus. To the Puritans, in America and in England, it was the death and Resurrection that mattered, not the birth.

December 25, 1635: Samuel de Champlain, the explorer known as "the Father of New France," dies from the effects of a stroke, at the city he founded, Québec -- which is still a capital, of the Province of Québec. He was 61.

December 25, 1642: Isaac Newton is born in Wolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, in the north of England. And, from what I've heard of his personality, Sir Isaac could be considered, as they say in English "football," a Dirty Northern Bastard. In other words, if you messed with him, clearly (Don't say it, Mike!), you didn't understand (Don't say it!) the gravity of the situation. (He said it... )

Actually, since England had not yet adopted the Gregorian Calendar, Newton spent his whole life believing that he was born on December 25, 1642, but science (which he did so much to advance) now shows him to have been born on January 4, 1643.

December 25, 1643: Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean is found and named by Captain William Mynors of the English East India Company vessel, the Royal Mary. It became a British possession in 1888, and was transferred to Australian control in 1958.

December 25, 1647: The Puritan-led English Parliament bans the celebration of Christmas, considering it "a popish festival with no biblical justification," and "a time of wasteful and immoral behavior." Oliver Cromwell, essentially the country's dictator from 1647 until his death in 1658, probably never spoke the words, but he would have agreed with Ebenezer Scrooge's assessment of Christmas celebration: "Bah! Humbug!"

Parliament replaces the "popish festival" with a day of fasting, although no one seems to have had the guts to tell Cromwell, "Um, yeah, Ollie? A day of fasting sounds like Yom Kippur. You know: A

This crossing is memorialized in an 1851 painting by, with some irony, a German-born American, Emmanuel Leutze. In a further irony, the British got their revenge, though it was small and unintentional: In World War II, the Royal Air Force destroyed the original painting, by bombing its location, the Kunsthalle art museum in Bremen. Leutze also painted a copy that hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But, like Jacques-Louis David's 1801 portrait Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass, showing Napoleon Bonaparte on a horse rearing back, leading his troops over the Alps, the painting is factually incorrect and logistically ridiculous. Just as Bonaparte, a brilliant military tactician, would have ridden a mule over the mountains (and there is a painting depicting that), a smart military veteran like Washington would never have stood up in his boat. It would have made him too easy a target, and it might have made the boat tip over.

The Pennsylvania location of the start of the crossing, then known as Taylorsville, is now known as Washington Crossing, in the Township of Upper Makefield. The New Jersey location where it finished is now known as Ewing, after one of Washington's aides, General James Ewing.

Among those who took part in the crossing were some future legends of American statecraft:

* Alexander Hamilton, Washington's Secretary of the Treasury and, in a way, the father of American conservatism.

* Henry Knox, Washington's Secretary of War (since 1947, the post has been named Secretary of Defense), for whom the Kentucky army base and gold depository Fort Knox, and the seat of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, are named.

* John Marshall, the longest-serving and most influential Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

* And James Monroe, 5th President of the United States, and who, under 4th President James Madison during the War of 1812, had the unenviable task of serving as Secretary of State and War at the same time, probably doing his country a greater service in that war than he did in the Revolution or in his Presidency.

Monroe, who was 25 at the time, is often cited as the young man sitting behind Washington in the painting, holding the flag. That's another error: If any flags made the crossing, they would have been kept hidden, so as not to give their bearers away. Washington was a big believer in the element of surprise, hence the night crossing.
December 25,  1777: British Captain James Cook visits an island that he names Christmas Island. This is not the same place cited in the 1643 entry. The U.S. takes possession of it in 1856, but it goes back to Britain in 1892. In 1979, it becomes part of the newly independent nation of Kiribati -- pronounced "Kiribass" in the natives' language. The island is renamed "Kiritimati," but it is still pronounced "Christmas."

December 25, 1799: Augustinam Hejnek is born in Germany, although it's not clear where. In 1870, at age 70, "Augusta" Hejnek moved to Chicago. Eventually, she moved to Casimir, Wisconsin, where she died on March 1, 1908, at age 108. She is believed to have been the last surviving person born in the 18th Century.

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December 25, 1806: A riot occurs in Lower Manhattan -- or what would have been considered "Midtown" at the time. Fifty members of the Hide Binders, a nativist gang of apprentices and propertyless journeyman butchers, gather outside St. Peter's Church at 22 Barclay Street, to taunt Catholic worshipers leaving Midnight Mass.

There would be no formal New York Police Department until 1845, so what we would now call "neighborhood watch groups" tried to preserve order. The night watch prevented a serious disorder on the Eve, but on Christmas Day, Irishmen fearing a Hide Binder attack arm themselves with cudgels, stones and brickbats. A skirmish breaks out, a watchman is killed, and the Hide Binders invade the Irishtown. The riot only ends when magistrates are able to restore order.

The only people to get arrested were Irish -- a far cry from the post-Civil War era, by which point the vast majority of the NYPD was Irish-born, and it remained manned largely by men of Irish descent well into the 20th Century.

Traditionally, new groups have always been viewed suspiciously by the establishment in America.  The Irish, the Germans, the blacks, the Jews, the Italians, the Chinese, the Hispanics, and in more recent times the Arabs and the South Asians have all, against their will, taken their turns as the targeted group.

In the early days of the United States, Irish Catholics were particularly targeted and barred from holding office through a series of laws and requirements, such as a 1777 naturalization clause. The 1806 Christmas Riots occurred less than a year following the election of the 1st Irish Catholic member to the New York State Assembly.

December 25, 1814: The Rev. Samuel Marsden holds the 1st Christian service on land in New Zealand, at Rangihoua Bay. The contry would receive its independence fro Britain in 1856, 45 years before neighboring Australia would.

December 25, 1815: The Handel and Haydn Society, the oldest continually operating performing arts organization in America, hosts its 1st performance, at King's Chapel in Boston. Given that Handel had written "Joy to the World," this is appropriate.

Note: I previously had this entry incorrectly listed as 1822.

December 25, 1826: The Eggnog Riot, a.k.a. the Grog Mutiny, takes place at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Twenty cadets were court-martialed. No. I am not making that up. There was an Eggnog Riot at West Point.

Among the cadets who took part, but was not punished, was Jefferson Davis, future U.S. Senator from Mississippi. He later served as Secretary of War under the aforementioned Franklin Pierce, and as President of the Confederate States of America. Among the cadets who did not take part was Robert E. Lee, who became President Davis' leading General.

December 25, 1831, 190 years ago: The Great Jamaican Slave Revolt, also known as the Baptist War or the Christmas Rebellion, begins, led by the Reverend Samuel Sharpe. Up to 20 percent of Jamaica's slaves, 60,000 of them, mobilize. By January 4, 1832, British forces under the control of the inaptly-named Sir Willoughby Cotton put the rebellion down.

The "plantocracy" retaliates by killing 207 slaves during the revolt, and over 300 more through executions, including some for minor offenses such as theft. This infuriated the colonists' masters back in London, and the process of emancipation began. In 1833, slavery was banned throughout the British Empire, with a few exceptions, including Jamaica. That exemption was removed in 1838, and all others were by 1843 -- 22 years before America, and 46 years before Brazil became the last industrialized nation to ban it, in 1889.

December 25, 1835: Orville Elias Babcock is born in Franklin, Vermont. He went to West Point, and graduated 3rd in the Class of 1861. He was an aide to General Ulysses S. Grant during and after the American Civil War, and when Grant became President, he named Babcock his Secretary -- in modern terms, his White House Chief of Staff.

This was a mistake. Babcock was indicted in 1875 as part of the Whiskey Ring, and again in 1876 as part of the Safe Burglary Committee. Both times, Grant's testimony gained him an acquittal, but damaged Grant's reputation. But the acquittals enabled him to serve as Inspector of Lighthouses in Florida under succeeding Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield and Chester Arthur. He died in 1884, still holding that job.

December 25, 1837: The Battle of Lake Okeechobee is fought in Florida, as part of the Second Seminole War. The Seminoles, under the command of Holata Micco (known to the U.S. government as Billy Bowlegs), defeats U.S. troops under the command of Colonel Zachary Taylor.

The problem was that Taylor's subcommander, Colonel Richard Gentry, was too timid to face the enemy, and was one of the American soldiers killed. Taylor's report back to Washington said so, and he was promoted to Brigadier General, and won the nickname "Old Rough and Ready." Though he lost the battle, it put him on the path to become the leading U.S. hero of the Mexican-American War of 1846-47, and to be elected President in 1848.

Eventually, the U.S. Army would win the war, and force the resettlement of the Seminoles to "the Indian Territory," present-day Oklahoma. Nonetheless, the name survives in Florida's Seminole County, and in the name of the sports teams at Florida State University, the Seminoles.

Taylor died in office in 1850. Holata Micco would live on until 1859, long enough to visit Washington, and to see a portrait of Taylor in the Capitol Building. Recognizing his old opponent, he pointed and said, "Me whip!"

December 25, 1843: With Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol having debuted earlier in the year, art shop owner Henry Cole prints up the first Christmas cards, costing one shilling each -- rather expensive by the standards of the time. But the debut in 1840 of the penny post -- a stamp costing 1 penny, 1/240th of a pound sterling at the time, could get your letter sent anywhere in the United Kingdom -- made the mailing, and thus the popularization, of Christmas cards possible.

At any rate, here's a picture of the very first Christmas Card. Note that a woman is feeding a child a glass of wine.
December 25, 1847: "Minuit, Chretiens" debuts, written in French by Adolphe Adam. In 1855, Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight wrote English lyrics, making it "O Holy Night."

In 1973, Harry Chapin would write "Mr. Tanner," and his bass guitarist, John Wallace, would sing the song as the title character -- as Harry wrote, "He did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole" -- even though the song "Mr. Tanner" makes no mention of Christmas itself.

December 25, 1849: James Rees, a Christian missionary from Philadelphia, publishes the short story "A Christmas legend." This is the 1st literature to explicitly say that Santa Claus has a wife.

Two years later, the Yale Literary Magazine printed a story that gives Mrs. Claus a name -- sort of. She's listed as simply "Mrs. Santa Claus." In 1889, Katharine Lee Bates, composer of "American the Beautiful," published the poem "Goody Santa Claus On a Sleigh Ride" -- "Goody" being short for "Goodwife," an old New England term with the same meaning as "Mrs." This fleshed out her character as a bespectacled, chubby old woman -- essentially, a feminine, beardless, but otherwise physical match for her husband.

She has since become part of the legend, helped by the Rankin-Bass TV specials, from 1964 and

Rudolph onward. Yet she is rarely given a first name. In Rankin-Bass' 1970 special Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, she was named Jessica. In 1985's Santa Claus: The Movie, she was Anya, suggesting an Eastern European origin, tying in with the fact that much of the Santa legend comes from tales from Russia. In the 2011 animated Arthur Christmas, she was Margaret.

December 25, 1852: Henry Tifft Gage is born in Geneva, in Central New York, grows up in Saginaw, Michigan, and becomes a lawyer in California. He was that State's Governor at the turn of the 20th Century, serving from 1899 to 1903, as a Republican. This included the founding of baseball's Pacific Coast League. He died in 1924.

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This date is also the Christmas debut of "O Little Town of Bethlehem," written by Phillips Brooks, then rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia.

December 25, 1870: This was the 1st year in which December 25 was officially a federal holiday in America, thanks to a bill passed by Congress, and signed into law by President Grant.

Also on this day, Chaja Rubinstein is born in Krakow, Poland. Better known as Helena Rubinstein, she becomes a cosmetics tycoon, and lives on until 1965. Those of us who grew up on PBS' childrens' programming in the 1970s and '80s know her name from the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, which contributed funding for Sesame Street, The Electric Company, et al.

December 25, 1876: Muhammad Ali Jinnah is born in Karachi, British India. He becomes the founder of the nation of Pakistan in 1947, but lives only a year after its establishment.

December 25, 1878: Louis Chevrolet is born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. A pioneer of auto racing, he founded the car company that bears his name. Which may also make his company the source of Eartha Kitt's Christmas 1953 request: "Santa baby, a '54 convertible, too, light blue." He did not live to hear that song, dying in 1941.

December 25, 1884: Evelyn Nesbit is born outside Pittsburgh in Tarentum, Pennsylvania. She became a popular Broadway actress after getting on the "casting couch" of architect, and friend of theater producers, Stanford White.

After marrying playboy Harry Thaw, a fellow Pittsburgher, she saw Thaw murder White, in the roof garden of the second Madison Square Garden (which White had designed), on June 25, 1906, resulting in "the Trial of the Century," making her the most familiar woman in America thanks to the era's "yellow journalism."

Her life was a disaster after that. Before her death in 1967, she said of the only man she truly loved, "Stanny White died. My fate was worse: I lived."

December 25, 1887: Conrad Nicholson Hilton is born in Socorro County, New Mexico Territory -- it wouldn't become a State until 1912. Sadly, the hotel icon, who lived until 1979, is now best known for his socialite great-granddaughters, Paris and Nicky. He was recently played by Chelcie Ross on Mad Men. (You may also remember Ross as Eddie Harris, the hypocritical grizzled veteran pitcher in Major League.)

Also on this day, Glenfiddich single malt Scotch whiskey is first produced. Merry Christmas, indeed. Of course, this may also bring us back to the subject of the Hilton sisters.

December 25, 1889: Lila Bell Acheson is born in Virdon, Manitoba, Canada. In 1921, she married DeWitt Wallace, born 6 weeks before she was. In 1922, they founded Reader's Digest magazine. He lived until 1981, she until 1984.

December 25, 1890: Oklahoma Territorial Agricultural and Mechanical College is founded in Stillwater, a year after the former Indian Territory was taken over and settled by white people. In 1907, with the coming of Statehood, it became Oklahoma A&M. In 1958, the name was changed to Oklahoma State University.

The school was known for a basketball team that won the 1944 and 1945 National Championships under coach Henry Iba, and for building perhaps the greatest college wrestling program. Its football team has been considerably less successful.

OSU athletes have included: Baseball players Allie Reynolds, Joe Horlen, Jerry Adair, Gary WArd, Robin Ventura, Mickey Tettleton, Pete Incaviglia, Jeromy Burnitz, Matt Holliday, Josh Fields, and Boston Red Sox manager John Farrell; football players Sonny Keys, Walt Garrison, Jim Turner, Jerry Sherk, Dexter Manley, Thurman Thomas, Heisman Trophy winner Barry Sanders, Leslie O'Neal, Charlie Johnson, Jason Gildon and Dez Bryant, and coach Buddy Ryan (Rex' father); basketball players, Bob Kurland, John Starks, Bryant Reeves and Joey Graham, Kansas coach Bill Self, and Don Haskins, coach of the 1966 National Champion Texas Western (now Texas-El Paso) team; and the current wrestling coach, Olympic Gold Medalist John Smith. And, if you count golf, Bob Tway, Rickie Fowler and Scott Verplank.

Other alumni include: Oklahoma Senators Henry Bellmon, Don Nickles and Tom Coburn; Governors Bellmon and Mary Fallin; astronaut Stuart Roosa; oilman T. Boone Pickens, who donated enough money to the school to get the football stadium named after him; law professor and political figure Anita Hill; Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould; singers Hoyt Axton and Garth Brooks; and actors Gary Busey and James Marsden. It's also the alma mater of fictional character Ellie Bishop, part of the Special Agent team on CBS' drama NCIS.

Also on this day, Robert LeRoy Ripley is born in Santa Rosa, California. Yes, he was born on a Christmas Day – believe it or not!

Actually, a lot of the items he put in Ripley's Believe It Or Not were stone-cold lies that put in because he just plain liked them.  But some of them were true. He died in 1949.

December 25, 1892: The Nutcracker Suite premieres at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia the preceding week, December 18. The ballet, with music by Pyotr Tchiakovsky and a libretto and choreography by Marius Petipa, tells a Christmastime story of little Clara Stahlbaum, her doll, and a prince cursed to live as a nutcracker.

"The March of the Toy Soldiers," "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy," and "The Dance of the Reed Flutes" have all become part of the lexicon of Christmas music.

Due to the fantasy nature of the story, most film versions have been animated: 1979 (stop-motion), 1988 (using the Care Bears as characters), 1990, 2001 (using the Barbie doll in place of Clara) and 2007 (with cartoon legends Tom and Jerry).

A live-action version was done in 2010 with Elle Fanning as Clara, and lyrics to Tchaikovsky's songs by Tim Rice, but it bombed. In 2018, Disney (which had used some of the music in Fantasia in 1940) released The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, moving the action to London, and starring Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, and Mackenzie Foy as Clara.

December 25, 1895: The legend of "Stagger Lee" is born -- and it is definitely not a song of holiday cheer. Lee Shelton, a black pimp known as "Stack" or "Stacker" Lee, ran an, um, entertainment venue called the Four Hundred Club in St. Louis. He and William Lyons, also involved in the St. Louis underworld, were drinking in the Bill Curtis Saloon. They began to argue, and Lyons took Shelton's Stetson hat off his head. For this offense, Shelton shot Lyons, killing him. Shelton was convicted, served 12 years for murder, was imprisoned again for robbery, and died in prison in 1912.

As early as 1897, during Shelton's trial, the 1st song about the murder was performed. It spread throughout American music, black and white alike, and, depending on the singer's accent, the perpetrator (and thus the title) could be "Stacker Lee," "Stack-o-Lee,""Stag-o-Lee,""Stagger Lee," and so on. The legendary New Orleans pianist Mac "Dr. John" Rebennack claimed that there were so many versions, he could sing the song for half an hour and never repeat a verse.

Eventually, "Stagger Lee" became the best-known version of the man's name. But the song, as most people know it now, gets the details wrong: In most versions, "Stagger Lee" and "Billy" are shooting dice in an alley late at night, and Billy, having already won all of Stagger Lee's money and Stagger's brand-new Stetson hat, tries to cheat him. So Stagger Lee goes home, gets his gun, goes to the bar, and, despite Billy pleading for his life -- "I got three little children and a very sickly wife" -- shoots him.

Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanians became the 1st white act to record it, in 1923. Lloyd Price hit Number 1 with it in 1959, but there was a problem: It was on ABC-Paramount Records, and ABC not only owned the label, but aired American Bandstand. That show couldn't have the Number 1 song in the country played for teenagers, on live national daytime television, with the words, "Stagger Lee shot Billy, oh, he shot that poor boy so bad, 'til the bullet came through Billy and it broke the bartender's glass!" (How did that lyric get past 1950s censors in the first place?)

So they had Price record a cleaned-up version, in which Stagger Lee and Billy aren't gamblers with guns, but friends, until Billy stole Stagger Lee's girlfriend, but Billy feels bad and gives her back, and the guys make up, and are both alive at the end.

The beginning of the Price recordings makes it immediately easy to tell the difference: In the original version, Price begins the song singing, in his New Orleans accent, "The night was Claire"; while in the cleaned-up version, he sings it straight, "The night was clear." In both versions, "and the Moon was yellow, and the leaves came tumbling down." (It's a haiku: Five syllables, seven, five.)

December 25, 1897: Actually, the "Yes, Virginia" editorial was published in the New York Sun on September 21 of this year. Laura Virginia O'Hanlon was then 8 years old. She married briefly, keeping the name Laura Douglas after her divorce. She had a daughter with her brief husband, got a doctorate from Fordham University, taught in New York's public schools from 1912 to 1935, was a principal from then until 1959, and lived on until 1971, always answering letters from kids who asked about the story.

Actually on this day, Piero Calamai is born in Genoa, Italy. Serving in the Royal Italian Navy, he was decorated for his service in both World Wars. Genoa was also the hometown of the Italian Renaissance statesman Andrea Doria, and Calamai was named Captain of the cruise ship named for Doria.

He was in command of it when it collided with another cruise ship in a late-night fog off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts on July 25, 1956, sinking the next day, with 46 deaths. He retired from the Navy upon returning home.

To make matters worse, the following year, his brother Marco, also an Admiral, was lost at sea. Piero Calamai died in 1972, having said, "Before, I used to love the sea. Now, I hate it."