Winter Wonderland

honesdale, and a sanatorium

Felix Bernard wrote the music and Richard B. Smith the words, in 1934. Smith came from Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and the Scranton Times-Tribune traces the song to the sight of the town's Central Park under snow; he wrote the lyrics while he was being treated for tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Scranton. Richard Himber recorded it first, and more than 200 artists have since.

The song most people know is not quite the original. A 1947 revision added a children's lyric, turning a romance in the snow into playing in it. Parson Brown, the preacher the couple pretend the snowman is, so that he can marry them, became a circus clown, and the promises in the last verse became frolicking. Singers from Johnny Mathis onward have stitched the two versions together.

inside out night

On the evening of 18 December 2002 Radiohead broke off from finishing Hail to the Thief for “Inside Out Night”, a webcast of four songs from their studio in Oxford, with Colin Greenwood and Thom Yorke hosting and records in between. Two of the songs were new, “I Froze Up” and the first “Morning Mr Magpie”, and “A Punchup at a Wedding” came back as a sparse piano piece. The fourth was this, a loose, knockabout take that never went further than that night.