The Twelve Days of Christmas: A bestselling Christmas read to devour in one sitting!

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Similar statements are found in John Rutter's 1967 arrangement, [76] and in the 1992 New Oxford Book of Carols. [77] This article is about the Christmas carol. For other uses, see The Twelve Days of Christmas (disambiguation). 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. [102] [103] Perry Como recorded a traditional version of "Twelve Days of Christmas" for RCA Victor in 1953, but varied the lyrics with "11 Lords a Leaping", "10 Ladies Dancing", and "9 Pipers Piping". The orchestrations were done by Mitchell Ayres.

And so on. Each day was taken up and repeated all round; and for every breakdown (except by little Maggie, who struggled with desperately earnest round eyes to follow the rest correctly, but with very comical results), the player who made the slip was duly noted down by Mabel for a forfeit. The Twelve Days" was a Christmas game. It was a customary thing in a friend's house to play "The Twelve Days," or "My Lady's Lap Dog," every Twelfth Day night. The party was usually a mixed gathering of juveniles and adults, mostly relatives, and before supper — that is, before eating mince pies and twelfth cake — this game and the cushion dance were played, and the forfeits consequent upon them always cried. The company were all seated round the room. The leader of the game commenced by saying the first line. [...] The lines for the "first day" of Christmas was said by each of the company in turn; then the first "day" was repeated, with the addition of the "second" by the leader, and then this was said all round the circle in turn. This was continued until the lines for the "twelve days" were said by every player. For every mistake a forfeit — a small article belonging to the person — had to be given up. These forfeits were afterwards "cried" in the usual way, and were not returned to the owner until they had been redeemed by the penalty inflicted being performed. Meanings of the gifts [ edit ] Partridge in a pear tree [ edit ]

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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. [4] [5] John Julius Norwich's 1998 book, The Twelve Days of Christmas (Correspondence), uses the motif of repeating the previous gifts on each subsequent day, to humorous effect. Five gold rings" has often become "five golden rings", especially in North America. [7] In the standard melody, this change enables singers to fit one syllable per musical note. [10]

The Twelve Days of Christmas" is an English Christmas carol. A classic example of a cumulative song, the lyrics detail a series of increasingly numerous gifts given to the speaker by their "true love" on each of the twelve days of Christmas (the twelve days that make up the Christmas season, starting with Christmas Day). [1] [2] The carol, whose words were first published in England in the late eighteenth century, has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 68. A large number of different melodies have been associated with the song, of which the best known is derived from a 1909 arrangement of a traditional folk melody by English composer Frederic Austin. In the famous article The Complexity of Songs, Donald Knuth computes the space complexity of the song as function of the number of days, observing that a hypothetical "The m {\displaystyle m} Days of Christmas" requires a memory space of O ( n / log ⁡ n ) {\displaystyle O\left({\sqrt {n/\log n}}\right)} as m → ∞ {\displaystyle m\to \infty } where n {\displaystyle n} is the length of the song, showing that songs with complexity lower than O ( n ) {\displaystyle O({\sqrt {n}})} indeed exist. Incidentally, it is also observed that the total number of gifts after m {\displaystyle m} days equals m 3 / 6 + m 2 / 2 + m / 3 {\displaystyle m The third day of Christmas my true love sent to me three fat hens, two turtle-doves, a partridge, and a pear-tree; The second day of Christmas my true love sent to me two turtle-doves, a partridge, and a pear-tree; An anonymous "antiquarian", writing in 1867, speculated that " pear-tree" is a corruption of French perdrix ( [pɛʁ.dʁi], " partridge"). [18] This was also suggested by Anne Gilchrist, who observed in 1916 that "from the constancy in English, French, and Languedoc versions of the 'merry little partridge,' I suspect that 'pear-tree' is really perdrix (Old French pertriz) carried into England". [55] The variant text "part of a juniper tree", found as early as c. 1840, is likely not original, since "partridge" is found in the French versions. [11] [48] It is probably a corruption of "partridge in a pear tree", though Gilchrist suggests "juniper tree" could have been joli perdrix, [pretty partridge]. [56] [55]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 4 In the early versions "my true love sent to me" the gifts. However, a 20th-century variant has "my true love gave to me"; this wording has become particularly common in North America. [7]