Christmas Carols, for some reason, seem particularly liable to mondegreens, maybe because we learn them so young. I remember thinking about "the little Aw Jesus asleep in the hay" --I'd heard the expression, but now I knew what it was. And, I remember working out that Born couldn't have been King of Israel until some time after Solomon.

But my nicest one wasn't a Christmas carol. I distinctly heard, on the radio, many times,

"Yellover, so high in banana tree."

Someone's third grader daughter asked me what it meant, and I had to explain how, in Switzerland, in the winter, when people in a little villages in the mountains get lonely, it's hard for them to climb all the way down their mountain and up the next mountain to talk to someone in another village. So, they get out their alpenhorns (digression on the nature of alpenhorns) and blow. And the folks in the next village on the other side of the valley hear and understand, and they come out and blow their alpenhorns to show they're ready, and THEN

They have a Yellover.

Bless us all.