When I was a kid, I went to a Catholic elementary school, and we'd have mass where we all to sing hymns. There was one, I think it went "Go tell it on the mountain", but I always heard it as "Goatillet on the mountain" and imagined a goatillet as a strange goat-like creature standing on a mountain top. I always wondered why anyone would write a song about that, and what it had to do with religeon.

Anon

In the carol Ding Dong Merrily On High, I thought that the line hosanna in excelsis after the long "Gloria" was 'and someone has beaten Chelsea'

Helen

My little sister misunderstood the word of kid's hymn "Joshua and the Battle of Jericho" in Sunday School class. She sang "Joshua took the cherry from the Cherry Coke".

SBS in NJ

In the song Silent night theres the part that says

"round yon virgin mother and child
Holy infant so tender and mild"

up until 2 years ago I thought it was " Holy imbecile tender and wild"

if thats not bad enough i also went to a catholic school

Anon

At church we sang a hymn with the refrain, "Sing praises to His name, He forgets not His own." For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why I was being asked to praise God simply for remembering His own name.

Lance

When I was a child growing up in the Baptist church we sang a song call "Bringing in the Sheeves", I thought it was "Bringing in the Sheets", and all I could think of was my mother bringing the clothes in off the line and it certainly didn't make her rejoice to bring the sheets.

Crussie Edwards

When i was 7 i heard the hymn in the church. This hymn was about Sain Ann. I am Ann too so i thought that some people love me so much that they sing about me. I even thanked to some people in the church. I didn't know why they were laughing :)

Ann from Europe

When I was five, we often used to sing a hymn at school called "Lord of the Dance". However, whenever we came to the chorus I had this peculiar image of God and Jesus jumping up and down like deranged maniacs on a large couch. The problem, as I discovered years later, was that where the words were actually "I am the lord of the dance said he", I was hearing "I am the lord of the dance settee"!

Keith

I could never get over why everyone would sing such a gentle, sweet church hymn about a bomb. The song lyrics sounded like "There is a bomb in Gilead, to make the wounded body whole... to heal the sin-sick soul." I thought, what kind of a bomb could that be? Only one God could make I suppose. Finally the day of revelation came... "There is a balm in Gilead"

William

This isn't mine it's my little sisters:
When she was in first grade she was in the school nativity play and they all had to sing 'away in a manger'
She was convinced the words were 'A Wayne in a manger'! Bless her she must have wondered who this wayne person was and what he had to do with jesus. It was around the time of Wayne Rooneys england debut though...

Anna

my mother used to take me to church every sunday. just before all of us kids went to sunday school, we would sing the "gloria patri." i think this is in all presbyterian churches, but i'm not sure. the line goes something like "glory be to the father..."

up until i was maybe 15, i sang "guinea pig to the father..." nobody ever bothered to show me the words, and i sang it loud and proud every sunday.

brian

My mum said that when I used to sing "noahs arc" at school I would sing "who built the arc, no one, no one"

Clare

Up until tonight I used to think Silent Night went "brown young virgin" because Mary was from the Middle East.

When I was a kid we went to a church that had a bad overhead so everything looked blurry on it. It was complicated by my dad's bad eyes so when he would sing this one song he would sing "may it be a sweet, sweet sound in your car" instead of "may it be a sweet, sweet sound in your ear". He would sing it really loud too.

TJ

in "deck the halls", where you say "don we now our gay apparel" (as in "now we put on our brightly colored clothes") i thought it was "dawn we now our day of Harold". My family wasnt very religious, and i figured that another name for christmas was St. Harold's Day.

Bethan

There was a song that all the littlel kids sang. Something about "If you want to be hip to the Lord" Me and my sister were CONVINCED that it was really "If you want to HIT by the lord".

We argued about this with my mom for a long time.

Bara Boo

When we were little kids in Alabama, my sisters and I loved to sing our two favorite hymns in church. Eventually we (like so many others) learned that what we called "The Gladly Song" actually wasn't about an unfortunate bear who needed an operation to get his eyes fixed (which was exactly what we could look forward to ourselves, because if we kept crossing our eyes like that, they'd get stuck).

One Sunday morning much later, my mother was totally mystified when we asked whether we'd get to sing our other favorite hymn - the Plastic Thunder song. We had to sing it for her before she understood which song we meant: "I've got a piece of Plastic Thunder standing, down in my heart, down in my heart to stay." She laughed so hard, she cried... the real lyrics? "I've got a peace that passeth understanding down in my heart"...

She'd heard us sing about Plastic Thunder countless times, but never listened closely enough to realize. Of course, to this day we still prefer our version!

Leigh

When my school sang 'We Three Kings' in our Nativity play I thought the first line was 'We Three Kings of Ori and Tar' and thought that Ori and Tar were countries, and spent hours searching for them on my globe...

Erin

When they sang "When the roll is called up yonder" I always envisioned a piece of bread. It never occurred to me to wonder why a piece of bread would be called to heaven. I just took it on faith.

Anon

I used to think the song "Who Built the ark? Noah. Noah." was "Who built the Ark? No one, no one!"

Embarrassed Kent Girl

"I will cast, all of my Burdens, down at your feet"

turned into:

"I will cast all of my Birdies, down at your feet"

What God wants with a bunch of dead birds by his feet is beyond me.

Bara Boo