The battle over where the lyrics to 'Jingle Bells' were written still rages on.

That's right--strangely the debate for once is where, not who.

James Lord Pierpont was born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian pastor and abolitionist, and worked as a songwriter. His most noted composition was "The One Horse Open Sleigh," which would later gain worldwide fame entitled "Jingle Bells"--that holiday earworm beloved by kindergarteners worldwide hopped up on candy and caffeine and sung until their parents' ears bleed.

This means largely nothing except to local boards and chambers of commerce that are looking for any angle to promote their small towns and make a buck off a hapless tourist.

Enter Medford, MA, and Savannah, GA.

Savannah dances around the actual "where" part on their plaque.

Both locales have commemorative plaques honoring Pierpont, and both are damned if they're going to claim otherwise about their histories. If you're going to hang your hat on anything, it's a generic holiday song about sled races.

Are we going to call Mrs. Otis Waterman a liar?

Kyna Hamill, a theater historian at Boston University (and volunteer at the Medford Historical Society) decided to do the grunt work to figure out where, exactly, Pierpont penned the words. Her verdict? As she told BU Today and the Boston Globe, there's no proof he wrote the song in either town.

What's fact is the Pierpont's song was published in 1857 by Oliver Diston's publishing group out of Boston. Yet, throughout the 1850s, Pierpont moved back and forth between both Medford and Savannah. He moved down south to work with his brother, also a Unitarian pastor, and perform at the church as the organist and music director. He would also marry Savannah's mayor's daughter, and later fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

According to Hamill, Medford's claim that Pierpont wrote the song in 1850 is probably an editing screw-up based on a 1946 Boston Globe article that said the song was written in the 1850s, and the "s" simply was misplaced.

Yet, Hamill believes the most concrete evidence is that Pierpont actually wrote the song in Boston--not Medford or Savannah at all. Hamill discovered an 1857 playbill of a show in Boston where "Jingle Bells" was performed by actors in blackface as part of a minstrel show.

This would clash with The Songwriters Hall of Fame--which inducted Pierpont in 1970 (no rush or anything, folks)--as their biography of Pierpont simply says he wrote the song for a Thanksgiving church service in Savannah in 1857, and children loved it. Sure, Savannah doesn't get much snow ever, but he was channeling his inner New Englander apparently.

I'm feeling jngly all of a sudden.

Medford's mayor, Stephanie Burke, is having none of that. As she told the Globe, "It was written here, in the tavern. We take full ownership of it. It’s got a long history, and we’re proud of it."

She also noted the city would go out caroling and that "Jingle Bells will be sung repeatedly."

So you might want to avoid Medford for the time being to protect your ears.