The Rose Suchak Ladder Company

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, you know, that “most wonderful time of the year”. One of our family’s favorite things to do during this time is to watch some classic and not-so-classic Christmas movies. I was thinking today about “The Santa Clause”, the movie where Tim Allen falls into becoming the new Santa Claus because he accidentally kills the old one. There are some great lines in that movie, for example, when Scott Calvin and his son run outside to see what all the commotion is about :

Guy fell. Not my fault.
Reindeer on the roof. That is hard to explain.

It's the ladder.

Where the h…’d this come from?

Look here, Dad. "The Rose Suchak Ladder Company."

Huh? - Out by the roof there's a Rose Suchak ladder.

Just like the poem. - Just like the poem?

The Rose Suchak ladder is a mondegreen for “there arose such a clatter” in the poem, “The Night Before Christmas.” A mondegreen, as I recently learned, is a mishearing of a popular phrase or song lyric.

I recently experienced this when Chuck, Aimee and I went to the movies last week and there was a band playing in the restaurant across from the theater. They were playing a popular Spanish-style song that I’ve heard before, but I have no idea what the lyrics are. I could swear that the main line repeated over and over again is: “I need a one-ton tomato.” I’m pretty sure that I was mishearing the words and therefore it’s a mondegreen.

Anyway, I thought you’d be interested to know that the word Mondegreen was coined in 1954 by the writer Sylvia Wright. She had enjoyed the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" as a child and believed that one stanza went like this:

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
They hae slay the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

She was embarrassed to learn later in life that there was no Lady Mondegreen, but that, "They had slain the Earl of Moray, And laid him on the green."

You can read more about mondegreens here.

And here is a collection of Christmas Carol Mondegreens.
ht: Ralph the Sacred River on Mondegreens.