Every year, the holiday season encroaches more and more territory on the calendar. Halloween pumpkins barely have time to rot before big red bows, animatronic reindeer, and candy canes invade supermarket aisles. There used to be a steadfast rule: The lights don’t go up and—most importantly, the seasonal songs shouldn’t be sung—until after Thanksgiving.

But the issue goes deeper than those radio stations that have already begun rocking around the Christmas tree (before Christmas trees are even for sale!). Christmas season has not only eclipsed Thanksgiving—it has also stolen one of its few songs as well.

As Reddit user GroriousNipponSteer shared this week, “Jingle Bells” is a song meant to be sung on Thanksgiving day. Originally named “The One Horse Open Sleigh,”James Lord Pierpont composed the song in a tavern in 1850 for his Thanksgiving Sunday school class and the jingling bells referred to New England sleigh races, popular in the 19th century.

It would be officially published seven years later, after Pierpont performed it during a Thanksgiving concert at the church where he worked as an organist.

Decades later, it was co-opted by Christmas. Bing Crosby made “Jingle Bells” a Christmas hit in the 1940s, including it on his Merry Christmas record that quickly became one of the best-selling holiday albums of all time.

Crosby left out a few very important verses, however. In the original version, Pierpont divulges that it’s more than just those bells on bobtails ringing that are making spirits bright:

A day or two ago

I thought I’d take a ride

And soon, Miss Fanny Bright

Was seated by my side,

The horse was lean and lank

Misfortune seemed his lot

He got into a drifted bank

And then we got upsot.

[Chorus]

A day or two ago,

The story I must tell

I went out on the snow,

And on my back I fell;

A gent was riding by

In a one-horse open sleigh,

He laughed as there I sprawling lie,

But quickly drove away.

[Chorus]

Now the ground is white

Go it while you’re young,

Take the girls tonight

and sing this sleighing song;

Just get a bobtailed bay

Two forty as his speed

Hitch him to an open sleigh

And crack! you’ll take the lead.

The song was about old school drunken drag racing to impress the ladies.

“The words are actually associated with the idea that this is a song you sing while you’re drunk, talking about an event that happened while they were drunk,” Medford Historical Society’s vice-president Kyna Hamill told CBC News last year.

So this year, stick it to the Christmas season. Pour yourself a drink and toast to giving thanks—what fun it is to sing the sleighing song tonight!