The Twelve Days of Christmas (song)

"The Twelve Days of Christmas" is an English Christmas carol (Roud # 68) which enumerates a series of increasingly grandiose gifts given on each of the twelve days of Christmas. It is a cumulative song, meaning that each verse is built on top of the previous verses. It has been one of the most popular and most-recorded Christmas songs in America and Europe throughout the past century.

Music origin

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. In the early 20th century, Frederic Austin wrote an arrangement where he added his melody from "Five gold(en) rings" onwards (The New Oxford Book of Carols), which has since become standard.

Lyrics origin

"The Twelve Days of Christmas" is a children's rhyme that was originally published in a book called Mirth without Mischief in London around 1780. It was originally a memory and forfeit game and it was played by gathering a circle of players and each person took it in turns to say the first line of the rhyme. When it is the first player's turn again he says the second line of the verse and so on.

Years later the game and rhyme were adopted by Lady Gomme (an English collector of folktales and rhymes) as a rhyme that "the whole family could have fun singing every twelfth night before Christmas before eating nine pies and twelve cakes."

MLODY SMIERDZI !

Structure and lyrics

"The Twelve Days of Christmas" is a cumulative song, meaning that each verse is built on top of 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:

File:12 days 1st vs.png

The second verse:

The third verse begins to show some metrical variance, as is explained below:

...and so forth, until the last verse:

The time signature of this song is not constant, unlike most popular music. The introductory lines, such as "On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me", are made up of two 4/4 bars, while most of the lines naming gifts receive one 3/4 bar per gift with the exception of "Five gold(en) rings", which receives two 4/4 bars, "Two turtle doves" getting a 4/4 bar with "And a" on its 4th beat and "Partridge in a pear tree" getting two 4/4 bars of music. In most versions, a 4/4 bar of music immediately follows "Partridge in a pear tree." "On the" is found in that bar on the 4th (pickup) beat for the next verse. The successive bars of 3 for the gifts surrounded by bars of 4 give the song its hallmark "hurried" quality.

One peculiar aspect about this song is how the second through fourth verses use a different melody for the second through fourth items than in the fifth through 12th verses. Before the song gets to the "five golden rings," the melody, using solfege, is "sol re mi fa re" for the fourth through second items, as later found in the last verses for the 12th through sixth items. In the sixth through 12th verses, the melody for the fourth through second items is as shown above in the insert.

There are many variations of this song in which the last four objects are arranged in a different order (for example — twelve lords a-leaping, eleven ladies (or dames a-) dancing, ten pipers piping, nine drummers drumming). At least one version has "ten fiddlers fiddling." Still another version alters the fourth gift to "four mockingbirds."

There are some regional variants of the verb in the opening line of each verse. In the United States the true love "gave" the gifts to the singer. In the British version, the true love "sent" the gifts to the singer.

It has been suggested by a number of sources over the years that the pear tree is in fact supposed to be perdrix, French for partridge and pronounced per-dree, and was simply copied down incorrectly when the oral version of the game was transcribed. The original line would have been: "A partridge, une perdrix."

The fourth day's gift is often said to be four calling birds but was originally (and still is in many traditional renditions) four colly birds (a colly bird is an archaic term for a blackbird). The fifth's day's gift of golden rings refers not to jewelry but to ring-necked birds such as the ring-necked pheasant.

Meaning

A bit of modern folklore claims that the song's lyrics were written as a "catechism song" to help young Catholics learn their faith, at a time when practicing Catholicism was discouraged in England(1558 until 1829). There is no substantive primary evidence supporting this claim, and no evidence that the claim is historical, or "anything but a fanciful modern day speculation".

Christmas Price Index

Main article: Christmas Price Index

Since 1984, the cumulative costs of the items mentioned in the song have been used as a form of economic indicator. This custom began with and is maintained by PNC Bank. Two pricing charts are created, referred to as the "Christmas Price Index" and "The True Cost of Christmas." The “Christmas Price Index” is an index of the current costs of one set of each of the gifts given by the True Love to the singer of the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas." The “True Cost of Christmas” is the cumulative cost of all the gifts with the repetitions listed in the song. The people mentioned in the song are hired, not purchased.

Although initially intended as an amusing form of economic trivia, trends have emerged. The Christmas Price Index has often increased or decreased at a rate consistent with the other CPI - the Consumer Price Index, a widely followed measure of inflation produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The total costs of all goods and services for the 2007 "Christmas Price Index" is $19,507.19, an all-time high. The original 1984 cost was $12,371.36. Over the last 22 years, the prices of services in general have increased, while the price of goods has decreased. In the 1984 Christmas Price Index, goods were by far the more expensive component of the index. Today, services are a much bigger piece of the Index.

Comedy versions

The nature of the song lends itself to endless playful variations.

• Stan Freberg's "Green Chri$tma$" works parts of this song's melody into advertising for 1950s innovations such as tubeless tires.
• Allan Sherman recorded "The Twelve Gifts of Christmas", in which the gifts are early-1960s garage-sale items, such as a transistor radio with a broken earpiece.
• Walt Disney's Winnie-the-Pooh, in cooperation with Sears, Roebuck & Co. also made a version of the popular carol in the form of a special coloring book in 1973, which included things such as "five acrobats", "two pogo sticks" and "a hunny pot inna hollow tree".
• "The Twelve Daze of Christmas", with a different alcoholic drink for each day, was performed before a live audience by Fay McKay, starting the song sounding sober and ending up sounding extremely inebriated and disoriented.
• The Muppets version of the song, accompanied by John Denver, employs the normal lyrics, with the humor coming from the Muppets' unique twist, such as Miss Piggy's continual over-playing of the "Five Gold Rings" line.
• In 1982 the Canadian comedy duo, Bob & Doug McKenzie of SCTV fame, released a version on their album "The Great White North", in which the gifts are obscure Canada-oriented items.
• There is also a parody of the song called "The Twelve Pains of Christmas" (1987) by Bob Rivers, in which people complain about the hassles of the holiday, e.g. sending Christmas cards, facing in-laws, and no parking spaces at the mall.
• In 1994, Insane Clown Posse had their own very short version of the song on their Carnival Christmas EP.
• Another parody of the song, called "The 12 Days After Christmas" has to do with the singer and his/her "True Love" having a fight, and doing away with all of the "True Love's" presents.
• Another parody is by comedian Jeff Foxworthy entitled "Redneck Twelve Days of Christmas" (2003).
• In 2007, about 8,000,000 people watched a comic version of the "Twelve Days of Christmas" by Straight No Chaser when it went viral on YouTube. The version included the group's failure to be able to count the 12 days and interspersed snippets of other songs including “I Have a Little Dreidel” and Toto’s “Africa”.

External links

• 12 Days of Christmas Lyrics Christmas Lyrics to 12 Days of Christmas Carol / Christmas song

• Free scores by The Twelve Days of Christmas in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)