On the 13th day of ...

I put my toasty winter coat on the other day and found stuffed in a pocket a crumpled piece of paper from the holiday tree-lighting / sing-a-long. Oh right! What are the words to that song again?

I have sung Deck The Halls countless times in my life, and never before noticed that after one dons some gay apparel, one trolls the ancient Yule-tide carol. As we were singing, en masse, I caught the eye of a fellow townswoman. We are both well aware of the significant local sniping and trolling that goes on on the internet, and troll jumped out as a typo.

But! It is not! In fact, thank you Mental Floss, troll is a good old word well utilized in Deck The Halls:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), one of the meanings of troll, in use since the 16th century, is “to sing in a full, rolling voice; to chant merrily or jovially.” It’s related to the sense of rolling, or passing around, and probably came to be used to mean singing because of rounds, where the melody is passed from one person to the next.

Go figure. Troll on.