The Twelve Days of Christmas (song)

"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. There are many variations in the lyrics. The lyrics given here are from Frederic Austin's 1909 publication that established the current form of the carol. The first three verses run, in full, as follows: Subsequent verses follow the same pattern. Each verse deals with the next day of Christmastide, adding one new gift and then repeating all the earlier gifts, so that each verse is one line longer than its predecessor. • four calling birds • five gold rings • six geese a-laying • seven swans a-swimming • eight maids a-milking • nine ladies dancing • ten lords a-leaping • eleven pipers piping • twelve drummers drumming Variations of the lyrics The earliest known publications of the words to "The Twelve Days of Christmas" were an illustrated children's book, Mirth Without Mischief, published in London in 1780, and a broadsheet by Angus, of Newcastle, dated to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. • The 1780 version has "four colly birds"—colly being a regional English expression for "coal-black" (the name of the collie dog breed may come from this word). • The gifts associated with the final four days are often reordered. For example, the pipers may be on the ninth day rather than the eleventh. For ease of comparison with Austin's 1909 version given above: Scotland A similar cumulative verse from Scotland, "The Yule Days", has been likened to "The Twelve Days of Christmas" in the scholarly literature. "Pippin go aye" (also spelled "papingo-aye" in later editions) is a Scots word for peacock or parrot. Similarly, Iceland has a Christmas tradition where "Yule Lads" put gifts in the shoes of children for each of the 13 nights of Christmas. Faroe Islands stamps In the Faroe Islands, there is a comparable counting Christmas song. The gifts include: one feather, two geese, three sides of meat, four sheep, five cows, six oxen, seven dishes, eight ponies, nine banners, ten barrels, eleven goats, twelve men, thirteen hides, fourteen rounds of cheese and fifteen deer. These were illustrated in 1994 by local cartoonist Óli Petersen (born 1936) on a series of two stamps issued by the Faroese Philatelic Office. Sweden In Blekinge and Småland, southern Sweden, a similar song was also sung. It featured one hen, two barley seeds, three grey geese, four pounds of pork, six flayed sheep, a sow with six pigs, seven åttings of grain, eight grey foals with golden saddles, nine newly born cows, ten pairs of oxen, eleven clocks, and finally twelve churches, each with twelve altars, each with twelve priests, each with twelve capes, each with twelve coin-purses, each with twelve daler inside. France "Les Douze Mois" ("The Twelve Months") (also known as "La Perdriole"—"The Partridge") is another similar cumulative verse from France that has been likened to The Twelve Days of Christmas. According to de Coussemaker, the song was recorded "in the part of [French] Flanders that borders on the Pas de Calais". ==History and meaning==

Origins The exact origins and the meaning of the song are unknown, but it is highly probable that it originated from a children's memory and forfeit game. The twelve days in the song are the twelve days starting with Christmas Day to the day before Epiphany (which occurs on 6 January). Twelfth Night is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the evening of January 5th, the day before Epiphany, which traditionally marks the end of Christmas celebrations". The best known English version was first printed in Mirth without Mischief, a children's book published in London around 1780. The work was heavily illustrated with woodcuts, attributed in one source to Thomas Bewick. In the northern counties of England, the song was often called the "Ten Days of Christmas", as there were only ten gifts. It was also known in Somerset, Dorset, and elsewhere in England. The kinds of gifts vary in a number of the versions, some of them becoming alliterative tongue-twisters. "The Twelve Days of Christmas" was also widely popular in the United States and Canada. It is mentioned in the section on "Chain Songs" in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Indiana University Studies, Vol. 5, 1935), p. 416. There is evidence pointing to the North of England, specifically the area around Newcastle upon Tyne, as the origin of the carol. Husk, in the 1864 excerpt quoted below, stated that the carol was "found on broadsides printed at Newcastle at various periods during the last hundred and fifty years", i.e. from approximately 1714. In addition, many of the nineteenth century citations come from the Newcastle area. Some authors suggest a connection to a religious verse entitled "Twelfth Day", found in a thirteenth century manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge; this theory is criticised as "erroneous" by Yoffie. It has also been suggested that this carol is connected to the "old ballad" which Sir Toby Belch begins to sing in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Manner of performance Many early sources suggest that The Twelve Days of Christmas was a "memory-and-forfeits" game, in which participants were required to repeat a verse of poetry recited by the leader. Players who made an error were required to pay a penalty, in the form of offering a kiss or confection. Halliwell, writing in 1842, stated that "[e]ach child in succession repeats the gifts of the day, and forfeits for each mistake." Another suggestion is that an old English drinking song may have furnished the idea for the first gift. William B. Sandys refers to it as a "convivial glee introduced a few years since, 'A Pie [i.e., a magpie] sat on a Pear Tree,' where one drinks while the others sing." The image of the bird in the pear tree also appears in lines from a children's counting rhyme an old Mother Goose. : A pye sate on a pear tree, Heigh O : Once so merrily hopp'd she; Heigh O : Twice so merrily, etc. : Thrice so, etc. French hens Gilchrist suggests that the adjective "French" may mean "foreign". Sharp reports that one singer sings "Britten chains", which he interprets as a corruption of "Breton hens". William and Ceil Baring-Gould also suggest that the birds are Breton hens, which they see as another indication that the carol is of French origin. Multiple sources confirm that it is a dialectal word, found in Somerset and elsewhere, meaning "black", so "colly birds" are blackbirds. William and Ceil Baring-Gould reiterate this idea, which implies that the gifts for the first seven days are all birds. Others suggest the gold rings refer to "five goldspinks"—a goldspink being an old name for a goldfinch; or even canaries. However, the 1780 publication includes an illustration that clearly depicts the "five gold rings" as being jewellery. McKellar offered no evidence for his claim. Three years later, in 1982, Fr. Hal Stockert wrote an article (subsequently posted online, in 1995) in which he suggested a similar possible use of the twelve gifts as part of a catechism. The possibility that the twelve gifts were used as a catechism during the period of Catholic repression was also hypothesised in this same time period (1987 and 1992) by Fr. James Gilhooley, chaplain of Mount Saint Mary College of Newburgh, New York. Snopes.com, a website reviewing urban legends, Internet rumours, e-mail forwards, and other stories of unknown or questionable origin, concludes that the hypothesis of the twelve gifts of Christmas being a surreptitious Catholic catechism is incorrect. None of the enumerated items would distinguish Catholics from Protestants, and so would hardly need to be secretly encoded. ==Music==

Standard melody The now-standard melody for the carol was popularised by the English baritone and composer Frederic Austin. The singer, having arranged the music for solo voice with piano accompaniment, included it in his concert repertoire from 1905 onwards. A Times review from 1906 praised the "quaint folk-song", while noting that "the words ... are better known than the excellent if intricate tune". Austin's arrangement was published by Novello & Co. in 1909. According to a footnote added to the posthumous 1955 reprint of his musical setting, Austin wrote: A number of later publications state that Austin's music for "five gold rings" is an original addition to an otherwise traditional melody. An early appearance of this claim is found in the 1961 University Carol Book, which states: Similar statements are found in John Rutter's 1967 arrangement, and in the 1992 New Oxford Book of Carols. Many of the decisions Austin made with regard to the lyrics subsequently became widespread: • The initial "On" at the beginning of each verse. • The use of "calling birds", rather than "colly birds", on the fourth day. • The ordering of the ninth to twelfth verses. The time signature of this song is not constant, unlike most popular music. This irregular meter perhaps reflects the song's folk origin. The introductory lines "On the [nth] day of Christmas, my true love gave to me", are made up of two bars, while most of the lines naming gifts receive one bar per gift with the exception of "Five gold rings", which receives two bars, "Two turtle doves" getting a bar with "And a" on its fourth beat and "partridge in a pear tree" getting two bars of music. In most versions, a bar of music immediately follows "partridge in a pear tree". "On the" is found in that bar on the fourth (pickup) beat for the next verse. The successive bars of three for the gifts surrounded by bars of four give the song its hallmark "hurried" quality. The second to fourth verses' melody is different from that of the fifth to twelfth verses. Before the fifth verse (when "Five gold rings" is first sung), the melody, using solfege, is "sol re mi fa re" for the fourth to second items, and this same melody is thereafter sung for the twelfth to sixth items. However, the melody for "four colly birds, three French hens, two turtle doves" changes from this point, differing from the way these lines were sung in the opening four verses. In the final verse, Austin inserted a flourish on the words "Five gold rings". This has not been copied by later versions, which simply repeat the melody from the earlier verses. Earlier melodies The earliest known sources for the text, such as Mirth Without Mischief, do not include music. A melody, possibly related to the traditional melody on which Austin based his arrangement, was recorded in Providence, Rhode Island in 1870 and published in 1905. Cecil Sharp's Folk Songs from Somerset (1905) contains two different melodies for the song, both distinct from the now-standard melody. Several folklorists have recorded the carol using traditional melodies. Peter Kennedy recorded the Copper family of Sussex, England singing a version in 1955 which differs slightly from the common version, whilst Helen Hartness Flanders recorded several different versions in the 1930s and 40s in New England, where the song seems to have been particularly popular. Edith Fowke recorded a single version sung by Woody Lambe of Toronto, Canada in 1963, whilst Herbert Halpert recorded one version sung by Oscar Hampton and Sabra Bare in Morgantown, North Carolina. One interesting version was also recorded in 1962 in Deer, Arkansas, performed by Sara Stone; the recording is available online courtesy of the University of Arkansas. == Parodies and other versions==

sing their comedy version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" on 4 December 2009, at the Wallace Theater, Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. • Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters recorded the traditional version of this song on 10 May 1949 for Decca Records. • Perry Como recorded a traditional version of "Twelve Days of Christmas" for RCA Victor in 1953, but varied the lyrics with "eleven lords a leaping", "ten ladies dancing", and "nine pipers piping". The orchestrations were done by Mitchell Ayres. • Advertising-based snippets of a parody of the song show up in Stan Freberg's 1958 "Green Chri$tma$". • The Ray Conniff Singers recorded a traditional version in 1962, appearing on the album We Wish You a Merry Christmas. • Allan Sherman released two different versions of "The Twelve Gifts of Christmas". Sherman wrote and performed his version of the classic Christmas carol on a 1963 TV special that was taped well in advance of the holiday. Warner Bros. Records rushed out a 45 RPM version in early December. • Alvin and the Chipmunks covered the song for their 1963 album Christmas with The Chipmunks, Vol. 2. • The illustrator Hilary Knight included A Firefly in a Fir Tree in his Christmas Nutshell Library, a boxed set of four miniature holiday-themed books published in 1963. In this rendition, the narrator is a mouse, with the various gifts reduced to mouse scale, such as "nine nuts for nibbling" and "four holly berries". Later released separately with the subtitle A Carol for Mice. • Fay McKay, an American musical comedian, is best known for "The Twelve Daze of Christmas", a parody in which the gifts were replaced with various alcoholic drinks, resulting in her 1971 performance becoming increasingly inebriated over the course of the song. • Sears put out a special Christmas coloring book with Disney's Winnie the Pooh characters in 1973 featuring a version of the carol focusing on Pooh's attempts to get a pot of honey from a hollow honey tree, with each verse ending in "and a hunny pot inna hollow tree". • A radio play written by Brian Sibley, And Yet Another Partridge in a Pear Tree was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Christmas Day 1977. Starring Penelope Keith, it imagines the increasingly exasperated response of the recipient of the "twelve days" gifts. It was rebroadcast in 2011. • Jasper Carrott performed "Twelve Drinks of Christmas" in 1978 where he appears to be more inebriated with each successive verse. This was based on Scottish comedian Bill Barclay's version. • The Muppets and singer-songwriter John Denver performed "The Twelve Days of Christmas" on the 1979 television special John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together. It was featured on the album of the same name. The song has been recorded by the Muppets five different times, featuring different Muppets in different roles each time. • A Māori/New Zealand version, titled "A Pukeko in a Ponga Tree", written by Kingi Matutaera Ihaka, appeared as a picture book and cassette recording in 1981. • SCTV characters Bob & Doug McKenzie (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) released a "hoser" version on their spin-off album Great White North in 1982. The song only goes to the eighth day, with the gifts being (in descending order) eight comic books, seven packs of smokes, six packs of two-four [cases of 24 beers], five golden toques, four pounds of back bacon, three French toast, two turtlenecks, and a beer in a tree. During the song's outro, Bob bemoans Doug for not getting donuts, interjecting "You coulda gone down to, like, the good donut shop where if you buy a dozen [donuts], you get another one free and then, been thirteen for the thirteen days of Christmas." • Irish actor Frank Kelly recorded "Christmas Countdown" in 1982 in which a man named Gobnait O'Lúnasa receives the 12 Christmas gifts referenced in the song from a lady named Nuala. As each gift is received, Gobnait gets increasingly upset with the person who sent them, as said gifts wreak havoc in the house where he lives with his mother. This version charted in both Ireland (where it reached number 8 in 1982) and the UK (entering the UK chart in December 1983 and reaching number 26). The song peaked at number 15 in Australia in 1984. • "The Twelve Days of Christmas" is a 1987 Christmas song by The Lettermen will be single length 4:09 or 4:10 from the 1987 album It Feels Like Christmas and re-released again on 2013 by MVD Records. • American rock and roll radio on-air personality Bob Rivers made a version of the song, "The Twelve Pains of Christmas" (from Twisted Christmas, 1988), replacing the traditional gifts with a list of hassles associated with Christmas, such as installing decorative lighting, or going shopping for gifts. • Apo Hiking Society made their own cover version titled "12 Days of Pinoy Krismas" in 1991. • The Twelve Days of Christmas (TV 1993), an animated tale which aired on NBC, features the voices of Marcia Savella, Larry Kenney, Carter Cathcart, Donna Vivino and Phil Hartman. • In Hawaii, "The Twelve Days of Christmas, Hawaiian Style", with the words by Eaton Bob Magoon Jr., Edward Kenny, and Gordon N. Phelps, is popular. It is typically sung by children in concerts with proper gesticulation and a recording was released by Pure Heart in 1999. • The video game StarCraft: Broodwar released a new map named Twelve Days of StarCraft with the song which was adopted a new lyric featured units from the game by Blizzard on 23 December 1999. In 2013, CarbotAnimations created a new web animation, ''StarCraft's Christmas Special 2013 the Twelve Days of StarCrafts, with the song which was played in the map Twelve Days of Starcraft''. • VeggieTales parodied "The Twelve Days of Christmas" under the title "The 8 Polish Foods of Christmas" in the 1996 album A Very Veggie Christmas. It was later rerecorded as a Silly Song for the episode The Little Drummer Boy in 2011. • A special Creature Comforts orchestral arrangement of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" was made by British animator Nick Park and Aardman Animations. Featuring different animals discussing or trying to remember the lyrics of the song, it was released on Christmas Day 2005. • Christian rock band Relient K released a recording of the song on their 2007 album Let It Snow, Baby... Let It Reindeer. This version known for its slightly satirical refrain: "What's a partridge? What's a pear tree? I don't know, so please don't ask me. But I can bet those are terrible gifts to get." • A program hosted by Tom Arnold, The 12 Days of Redneck Christmas, which takes a look at Christmas traditions, premiered on CMT in 2008. The theme music is "The Twelve Days of Christmas". • A version by Crayola was made in 2008 titled The 64 Days of Crayola. • In the 2012 12 Disasters of Christmas movie, the song has actually been created by the Mayas to ensure that a prophecy of the end of the world be foretold among Europeans even after the destruction of the Mayas' civilization. • In Operation N.A.U.G.H.T.Y., a holiday episode of Codename: Kids Next Door, when Elfa force (an elf-themed parody of the X-Men) find themselves unable to defeat the KND they summon their most powerful weapon, which is dropping the presents from the song on top of their enemies, often in visual pun style, like having the "Pipers piping" being plumbers with pipes, the "calling birds" being flamingos inside phone booths and the "partridge on a pear tree" being Lucy Partridge. • Shannon Chan-Kent, as her character of Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, sings her own version of the song on the 2015 album ''My Little Pony: It's a Pony Kind of Christmas''. • There is a Bluey board book of the 12 Days of Christmas, published November 2022, based on the character Verandah Santa from Season 1, Episode 52, which aired in December 2019. • With reference to President Trump's impeachment just before Christmas 2019, the Washington International Chorus performed the 12 Days of Christmas carol, with specially adapted lyrics by BBC News. • Casts of Bubble Gang made their own 2025 parody version titled "12 Days of Kurakot". ==Total number and cost of gifts==

Assuming the gifts are repeated in full in each round of the song, the persona's true love sends them a total of 364 items by the twelfth day. The number of gifts received on each day is the sum of all integers up to n, known as a triangular number, expressed by \frac{\left(n\right)\left(n+1\right)}{2}. The number of gifts received in total is the sum of n triangular numbers, known as a tetrahedral number, expressed by \frac{\left(n\right)\left(n+1\right)\left(n+2\right)}{3\cdot2}. The former can be imagined as each number stacked up in a triangle, while the latter can be imagined as each triangle stacked up in a pyramid. Over the years, media creators have been using the motif of 364 Christmas gifts to humorous effect: • 1955: Wendy Toye directed On the Twelfth Day..., a British live action comedy short film wherein she also played the character of Miss Tilly. In Edwardian England, Miss Tilly's life becomes chaotic during the twelve days of Christmas as her boyfriend, Mr. Truelove, gives her hundreds of gifts; the short film ends with Miss Tilly and Mr. Truelove becoming engaged and flying away in his hot air balloon and her butler moving out of her crowded house. Even though animals were used in the making of On the Twelfth Day..., the swans were replaced with forty-two "boys a-singing". • 1972: Jenny Overton wrote The Thirteen Days of Christmas, an English children's novel that doubles as the author's take on the origins of the carol. The main plot of Overton's novel takes place during the holy days of Christmas, beginning on 25 December (Christmas Day) and ending on 6 January (Epiphany); during the first twelve days, the fairytale-obsessed Annaple Kitson's merchant boyfriend, Francis Vere, sends her birds, pear trees, rings, fresh milk, and entertainers, her mood changing from delight to frustration. With her father and neighbours enjoying the spectacle, it is Annaple's younger siblings who had given Francis ideas so they can marry her off and no longer have to deal with her strict rules and bad cooking. • 1977: Brian Sibley wrote an English black comedy radio broadcast titled ...And Yet Another Partridge in a Pear Tree. In their letters, a woman named Cynthia Bracegirdle (Penelope Keith) and her solicitors respond to her boyfriend, Algernon Fotherington-Smythe, whose sending her of the gifts drives her to suicide and instructing the solicitors to return all the assorted livestock and trafficked humans to him. • 1999: the final track of American singer Natalie Cole's album The Magic of Christmas is her cover of The Twelve Days of Christmas which ends with her adding up all 364 gifts and moving out of her crowded home. • 2016: in the British animated comedy short film The 12 Days of Christmas - A Tale of Avian Misery, a 21st century woman (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) narrates of the stress and troubles she endures when her boyfriend sends her all the gifts mentioned in the carol; the film ends with the narrator breaking up with her boyfriend and annually spending Christmas in the tropics to avoid receiving unwanted gifts. PNC Christmas Price Index Since 1984, the cumulative costs of the items mentioned in the Frederic Austin version have been used as a tongue-in-cheek 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 former 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 latter 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. The total costs of all goods and services for the 2023 Christmas Price Index is US$46,729.86, or US$201,972.18 for all 364 items. The original 1984 cost was $12,623.10. The index has been humorously criticised for not accurately reflecting the true cost of the gifts featured in the Christmas carol. ==Computational complexity==

In the famous article The Complexity of Songs, Donald Knuth computes the space complexity of the song as a function of the number of days, observing that a hypothetical "The m Days of Christmas" requires a memory space of O\left(\sqrt{n/\log n}\right) as m\to\infty where n is the length of the song, showing that songs with complexity lower than O(\sqrt{n}) indeed exist. Incidentally, it is also observed that the total number of gifts after m days equals m^3/6 + m^2/2 + m/3. In 1988, a C program authored by Ian Phillipps won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The code, which according to the judges of the contest "looked like what you would get by pounding on the keys of an old typewriter at random", takes advantage of the recursive structure of the song to print its lyrics with code that is shorter than the lyrics themselves. ==See also==