I might have been around the first or second grade, and naughty songs sung to Christmas carols dominated playground time. There’s the old chestnut “Jingle bells, batman smells, Robin laid an egg.” I don’t really remember the others, except for one that’s kinda weird: It was sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells,” but was about fighting Germans. I remember only the last three lines: “Look them Russkies win/We’re heading into Red Christmas/Marching through Berlin.”

Only many years later did it hit me that this was a 30-40 year-old song, if it was ever a song then. How did a bunch of kids around 1980 come to sing a Second World War song?

Ethel Merman has a song called “Marching Through Berlin.”