Bowdlerizing Christmas songs

The other day at the supermarket, they were playing Christmas songs at one of those listening stations at the end of an aisle, where you can buy the CD that you're hearing. It was on "Winter Wonderland" when I passed by, and I thought I heard something weird -- "something something he's a circus clown..."

It took a few moments for it to sink in that those aren't the real lyrics. It's supposed to go:

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
And pretend that he is Parson Brown.
He'll say "Are You Married?" We'll say "No man,
But you can do the job while you're in town!"

The song was originally written in 1934, just one year into the falling-crime period of the mid-century. Farther into the shift toward Dr. Spock and smothering mothers, in 1953 they re-wrote the bridge so that children wouldn't be scandalized by marriage, or perhaps to remove the slightest reference to religion (mid-century Christmas songs are almost all secular):

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
And pretend that he's a circus clown.
We'll have lots of fun with Mister Snowman,
Until the other kiddies knock 'im down!

That's the patronizing version I heard the other day in the supermarket, a sign of the neo-Dr. Spock times. What kind of rhyme is "snowman" with "snowman" anyway? Do they think children are too dumb to appreciate the subtle cheesiness of "snowman" and "No man"? We all got it when I was growing up. By the '80s, the kiddie version had been retired -- what gives today?

I searched LexisNexis to see when this version began making a comeback. The Bowdlerized lyrics (along with the original ones) appear in non-American Anglo countries in 1999 and continue regularly through the 21st century, as part of a larger printing of Christmas song lyrics. A 2009 article in the Kerrville Daily Times (Texas) makes a guessing game of "which song has these lyrics?" -- and it only includes the "circus clown" version in the hint for "Winter Wonderland." Then a 2011 article in the Enid News & Eagle (Oklahoma) tries to make fun of how unacceptable some old Christmas lyrics would sound to today's ears, and it too only refers to the censored version (i.e., would knocking down the snowman run afoul of the anti-bullying agenda?).

The trend had probably caught on somewhat earlier at the grassroots level before it was noticed and reproduced in the mass media (that's typical for person-to-person transmission). So the change began sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, as helicopter parenting became the norm.

Bowdlerizing an already inoffensive song is the height of paranoid over-parenting, not to mention a blow (however minor) against traditions -- and in the name of what? Cutesy infantilized "progress." The first attempt was made nearly 20 years after the original, and our recent revival comes 70 to 80 years after. Not like they released two versions around the same time, a la the censored "radio edit" of songs with curse words.

All of these minor blows to tradition add up to a nearly unrecognizable Christmas season these days compared to even 20 years ago, and none of it for the better. We're not supposed to care that wholesome song lyrics etched into our minds are being scrubbed away as though they were profane graffiti. After all, these days we get to enjoy peppermint mochas, peppermint bark, and peppermint cream cheese frosting -- three cheers for diversity and progress!