You know how it starts: “Over the river, and through the wood, / To grandfather’s house we go.” Look closely and the house belongs to grandfather. Grandmother turns up later, at the door, calling for “a pie for every one.”
Nor is it a Christmas song. Its real title is “The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day,” and the first stanza ends: “For ’t is Thanksgiving day.” It runs twelve stanzas, sleigh bells and all, and the last line is “Hurra for the pumpkin pie!” It appeared in 1845 in Lydia Maria Child’s Flowers for Children.
Child was a literary celebrity. She edited the first American children’s magazine, The Juvenile Miscellany (1826–1834).
Then, in 1833, she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, which called for the immediate abolition of slavery and an end to racial discrimination. Her old admirers turned on her. Sales of her books plummeted, and in 1834 canceled subscriptions forced her to give up the Miscellany.
About a decade later she wrote one of the cheeriest holiday poems Americans still sing.