Christmas Carol Film Flub: Little Women (1994)

 

Christmas Carol Film Flub: Little Women (1994)

by. R. Rojas

I was almost through all my Christmas movies this holiday season and I came across this film flub in the 1994 Little Women film.

Now, first, I wanted to discuss if Little Women is a Christmas move? I would put the 1994 version, at least, as "Christmas adjacent." It is definingly more Christmasy in comparison to the 2019 version. 

When viewing the film, one can see that the producers wanted to extend that Christmas feeling to viewers. The film begins around Christmas during the United States Civil War. There is/are subsequent Christmas scenes in the following years. 

Even the release of the 1994 Little Women may make it a Christmas movie and grant it removal from the adjacent jail. The film was released on Christmas Day 1994. In fact, the first sentence of the book talks about Christmas!

In the first Christmas scene, the sisters, mother, and housekeeper, are at the piano singing "Ding, Dong, Merrily, On High" on Christmas Eve. However, remember, the book describes the lives of these women during the U.S. Civil War and afteryears. The text that the little women are singing would not be set to the tune until the 1920s.

Although the tune is very old, being called "le branle de l'Official" in Orchésographie, a dance book written by Jehan Tabourot (1519–1593), the text is not that old. George Ratcliffe Woodward (1848–1934) wrote the text and set it to the music of "le branle de L'Official."  

The carol was first published in 1924 in his The Cambridge Carol-Book: Being Fifty-two Songs for Christmas, Easter, And Other Seasons. Charles Wood would write harmonies to the carol for its inclusion in the book.

It there a chance some version of it would have been floating around in the early 1860s. Unlikely. Woodward, born in 1848, would have been 13 years old at the start of the U.S. Civil War. Woodward did not begin his university studies until 1867. He was not ordained until 1874. "Ding Dong Merrily on High" was not included in Woodward's first carol book Hymns and Carols for Christmas-tide in 1897 Even if it was, it would be more than thirty years after the events in Little Women.

The book's first chapter implies they were singing "Twinkle, twinkle Little Star" at the piano.