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"Twelve Days of Christmas" is a traditional Christmas song, or Christmas carol. The Twelve Days of Christmas are (depending on who you talk to) either the days from December 26 to January 6, the Epiphany, or the days from Christmas through Twelfth Night, the eve of Epiphany. (Arguing in favor of the latter is that it coincides more closely with the liturgical Christmas season.) The date of the song's first performance is not known, though it was used in European and Scandinavian traditions as early as the 16th century. An interesting fact about this song is that the total number of presents given (counting 12 partridges, 11*2 turtle doves...) is 364 which is 1 less than the number of days in a year.
Structure
"Twelve Days of Christmas" is a cumulative song, meaning that each verse is built on top of all the previous verses. There are twelve verses, each describing a gift given by "my true love" on one of the twelve days of Christmas.
The first verse runs:
- On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
- A partridge in a pear tree.
The second verse:
- On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
- Two turtle doves
- and a partridge in a pear tree.
and so on. The last verse is:
- On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
- Twelve drummers drumming,
- eleven pipers piping,
- ten lords a-leaping,
- nine ladies dancing,
- eight maids a-milking,
- seven swans a-swimming,
- six geese a-laying,
- five golden rings;
- four calling birds,
- three French hens,
- two turtle doves
- and a partridge in a pear tree.
Symbolic interpretation
Some Christians assign symbolism to the gifts in the song. One version of these assigned meanings is:
This interpretation is usually taught with a story (widely considered to be apocryphal, as it is unsupported by any historical evidence) that English Catholics, suffering persecution in the 16th century, wrote the song with these hidden meanings.
Variations
Sometimes "gave to me" is used instead of "sent to me"; also "five golden rings" is sometimes "five gold rings."
The line four calling birds is an Americanization of the traditional English wording four colly birds. Colly is a dialect word meaning black and refers to the European blackbird Turdus merula.
The line four calling birds in some versions is four coiled birds.
As well, the last four verses are sometimes interchanged, so that one version of the song may have nine pipers, ten drummers, eleven ladies, twelve lords, or any other combination.
Many parodies of the "Twelve Days of Christmas" have been written. The version performed by the Canadian comedy team Bob & Doug McKenzie replaces the first gift with "a beer, in a tree" (metered to match the traditional "a partridge in a pear tree"), substituting the other gifts on the list with other stereotypically Canadian items such as French toast, back bacon, and tuques. Allan Sherman and Bob Rivers have written similar parodies.
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