The Twelve Days of Christmas (song)

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"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.

Contents 1 Music origin 2 Lyrics origin 3 Structure and lyrics 4 Meaning 5 Christmas Price Index 6 References 7 External links

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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"

[edit] 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:

The second verse:

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

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

Note: many British versions use "my true love sent to me" instead of "my true love gave to me", which is common in America and elsewhere.

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). ^[1] 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." ^[2]

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).^[3][4] The fifth's day's gift of golden rings refers not to jewelry but to ring-necked birds such as the ring-necked pheasant.^[4]

[edit] 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. 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". ^[4]

It is also traditionally assumed that the song recites a cumulative list of gifts, i.e. on Day One the singer receives one gift of one item; on Day Two, one gift of two items, etc. Thus the singer receives in total twelve "gifts," amounting to seventy-eight items (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 = 78). But if we imagine that each verse describes gifts received on each day, the total is then 78 gifts and 364 individual items (12 + 22 + 30 + 36 + 40 + 42 + 42 + 40 + 36 + 30 + 22 + 12 = 364). The basic mathematical formula for deriving the total number of gifts given up to a particular day N is: N(N+1)(N+2)/6. The number of gifts given on a particular day N is the arithmetic progression N(N+1)/2. See also triangular numbers.

[edit] 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.^[5] Over the last 22 years, the prices of services in general have increased, while the price of goods has decreased.^[clarify] 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.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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

• Twelve Days of Christmas, The (Traditional) free scores in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)