Now, driver, I want you to stop at the very first road, how you come to, understand?

All right, wood.

Easy.

What we're listening to right now is an old wax cylinder from 1898.

You're hearing the Edison Mail Quartet on a record called Slay Ride Party.

The record features some short skits and other songs, including the familiar one you're hearing now.

At the time this record was made, jingle bells, as the song is now known,

was only a few decades old, making this among the earliest surviving recordings of the song.

Now let's fast forward 67 years to 1965 and hear another rendition.

Roger. You stood in a Jimi 7, this is Jimi 6.

The voice you heard was that of Wally Shira. He and Tom Stafford were the astronauts on NASA's Gemini 6.

They made history for completing the first rendezvous of a spacecraft that

had a live crew on board with another spacecraft. But they also made history in another way,

because they had smuggled a harmonica and sleigh bells onto the craft. And on December 16th,

Shira contacted mission control to say that he had detected an object, possibly a satellite, about to reenter the Earth's atmosphere.

And he was going to try to patch through a signal to mission control.

And then, taking everyone by surprise, Shira and Stafford pulled out their smuggled instruments to play a rendition of jingle bells.

Not only was it a truly epic prank, but it also marked the first song ever to be broadcast from space. Not bad for a little

song that very well could have gone the way of similar music of the time, lost to history or hidden

in the pages of obscure anthologies. Jingle Bells is synonymous with Christmas, even though it never

mentions Christmas. It's one of the first Christmas songs Children Learn. It's an evergreen

beginner's piano piece, and it brings to mind those idealized and sentimental images of snow and

...