Through the years we all will be together.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas/Let your heart be light/From now on,/our troubles with be out of sight . . .

Yes of course you know it and the guys who wrote it must have made a fortune out of the song especially at this time of year – every year it gets played over the radio and in stores incessantly; in other words it gets played over again – then over and over and over again.

It was recorded by Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and everybody from the Fly Me to the Moon club; you can easily tell them as they wear tuxedos or open neck shirts outside their jackets and they have sun tans, comb overs, wigs or dyed black hair.

These songs are standards and they are still being recorded – I mean I can't wait for Tony Bennett's latest or next version of Goodie Goodie!! Can you?

The first attitude you get from the singers who sing the standards (apart from Sid Vicious – bless him) as soon as they open their mouths to sing is 'Hey!!! I'm so good!'

Well they are good; we can all recognize that but please – somebody write them a new song.

What I hate is when they take a rock song and try and turn it into a standard – it's a rock song!!!
Leave it alone!!

Walking in The Grove, next to the Farmer's Market here in Los Angeles, you will hear music by these guys piped out all day long - Frank Sinatra, Jack Jones, Sammy Davis Jr, Dean Martin etc – even my idol, Bobby Darin was drawn in to put his version of some of these songs.

But let's get back to Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas; for years I have heard it and I still hear it and the line 'Through the years we all will be together' makes me cringe every time I hear it; the guy who wrote these lyrics was one Ralph Blane.

What was the matter with saying 'we will all be together' – why did he have to say 'we all?'

I know in songs like 'Doe a Deer a Female Deer' the line 'Tea! A drink with Jam and Bread' was written that way so that bread would rhyme with thread but Ralph Blane had a free choice and wrote 'we all will.'

So I was thinking about this and suddenly the penny dropped; maybe he wrote that because that was the way he spoke – spoke I say because he died in the nineties; I hope he is still resting in peace but his family will be aware of that song as the cheques are still landing in their letter boxes.

He could have spoken like that because that is the way America speaks; when I came to America I noticed that the Americans split the infinitive all the time; I always knew of the famous line at the beginning of Star Treck 'To Boldly Go . . .' as opposed 'To Go Boldly...' but I thought it was only in the writing but no; they split the infinitive so much here that I believe it has been accepted as correct.

Before I set out to write this I looked up who wrote the song and it was credited to Hugh Martin and the aforementioned Ralph Blane; as I mentioned Ralph Blane died in the nineties but Hugh Martin, who is still alive, said in an NPR interview in 2006, that Ralph Blane had encouraged him to write the song but had not had anything more to do with writing it.

Surprising what you learn when you look.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas and you never know - through the years we will all be together whether we split infinitives or not.