The Twelve Days of Christmas

Everybody knows this song, because everybody has heard it at least twelve hundred times. This is because everyone who imagines they have a viable music career has felt the need to record this song at least once (along with every other imaginable Christmas song), as if their rendition will not be more than half as annoying as that of the last person that recorded it. This is a song on which there is no neutrality – you either love it or you hate it (and I have never yet heard anyone say that it is their favorite Christmas song).
The song of which I speak, and about which I am going to write, is “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, which is undoubtedly the most annoying song of its kind ever written. It also makes no sense. In fact, if John Lennon and Paul McCartney had taken the time to read its lyrics (and it is very doubtful that this could have happened), even they would not have been able to make any sense out of it, and in frustration would have tossed it in the wastebasket and continued writing about being a walrus or an egg-man, or riding in a yellow submarine with everyone else (for apparently we all live there), or saying hello when the rest of the civilized world says good-bye.
Then again, if the Fab Four had written “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, they might at least have given it a tune that would have made it catchy. But because they didn’t, we are stuck with a monotonous melody that is exactly the same for twelve incomprehensible stanzas. You would think the world would have washed its hands of a song that has no clearly discernible meaning or use. But no. In a valiant effort to redeem the irredeemable, economists have harnessed all the power of their dismal science and made a price index out of the items in this song, and every year they present to us exactly what these items would cost all together should we be insane enough to purchase them. But this only goes to show the utter uselessness of economists and why I would never in a million years want to be one of them. Since we still must listen to this song during this otherwise glorious season, the least we can do is analyze it to make sure that we can’t make any sense of it. And this I shall attempt to help us do.
The beginning is often the best place to start, although in this case I can’t see that it makes much of a difference. It must seem strange to most thoughtful people that, in a culture that celebrates only one day of Christmas, we have a song that speaks of twelve of them. Apparently, in old England, they celebrated twelve days of Christmas beginning the day after Christmas itself.* And since this is a very old song, we must allow for the carry-over of very old traditions.
Now then, the song itself is a story-song, and a very bad one at that.** It speaks of a gift that the singer’s “true love” gave to them on each day of Christmas. The song does not specify whether the singer is a man or a woman, and thus whether the true love is a man or a woman; this we shall attempt to determine. Each day, then, has a different gift, and the number of the gift corresponds with the particular number of that day of Christmas. Not only that, but the singer also has to repeat, at each stanza, what he or she got on each of the previous days of Christmas. Herein lies the origin of the song’s annoying effect, and the cumulative nature of the stanzas leaves all but the best singers completely out of breath by song’s end.
We shall now study each gift in its turn. On the first day of Christmas, the true love sent the object of their affection a partridge in a pear tree. Why the bird couldn’t have been in a cage and had to be in his own tree is beyond me. But what is done is done. However, I like birds, and as long as the partridge stayed in its pear tree and didn’t break out into singing “I Think I Love You”, I suppose we could get along. If he did, he would not be around long (for, you know, getting that song stuck in your head means suicide barring an intervention; and I would get him before he got me).
The second day’s gift from the true love consists of two turtle doves, and the third day only adds to our bird collection with three French hens. Nor does it stop there, for on the fourth day of Christmas the true love is back with four calling birds. So, even if the turtle doves are kind of cute and the partridge is not singing “I Think I Love You”, we now have the problem of hens with whom we have a language barrier and four birds who are indeed making noise (the nature of which is unknown – they may be calling to one another or calling me names or constantly using my telephone, but in any event, they are bound to be a noisy lot if such activity is truly their calling).
The true love now attempts to relieve some of the pressure of the situation by giving something of some value. The fifth gift is five gold rings – and have you seen the price of gold lately? At least it would give me enough purchasing power to acquire enough duct tape to shut up the birds.
With the gifts given on the sixth and seventh days of Christmas, our truly loving giver proves himself or herself to be, in the best case, either a birdwatcher or some kind of avian enthusiast. In the worst case, he or she has an unhealthy and frankly disturbing obsession with birds and perhaps may be Alfred Hitchcock himself come to drive us from our seaside village. For, you see, on the sixth and seventh days of Christmas we are to receive six geese a-laying and seven swans a-swimming. Even though these new animals may not be any noisier than the others, our problems still multiply. Now we have eggs all over the place from three French hens and six geese (which eggs are hopefully not fertilized by any male birds, in which case we may be stuck with many scary-looking hybrid hatchlings), and on top of that we have to keep our seven swans in some source of water (hopefully not our bathtub) so that they may continue to a-swim.
Fortunately, after the seventh day our true love stops with the birds already – but in exchange for that respite he or she plunges headlong into sheer insanity. On the eighth day of Christmas the gift happens to be eight maids a-milking. Now, this proves, at least to me, that the true love is not a woman. What woman would give her man, as a gift, eight females doing anything? The potential for destructive jealousy is simply too great. And so we know that the true love is a man and the singer is a woman (unless you live in California; but we won’t go there). But this gift is fraught with problems. If the eight maids are a-milking, they must be a-milking something. Are they milking cows? Goats? Yaks? Whatever the case, we must make room for yet more animals, and large ones at that.
The ninth day’s gift is nine ladies dancing. Again, this is proof that the true love cannot be a woman; however, it also does not conclusively prove that the reverse is true, for what female recipient would have any use for other ladies dancing? It also introduces yet more trouble. You see, nine ladies must have room to dance if they are to dance, and of this they have precious little, what with all of the other ladies and beasts of burden and birds taking up our space. Furthermore, if they are to dance, they must have music to dance to (unless they are mimes), whether it be “Swan Lake”, a Strauss waltz, a Polish mazurka, the jitterbug, or the Bee Gees. Thus we have more noise to throw on top of cackling hens, quacking geese, mooing cows, calling birds, and a partridge singing “I Think I Love You”. This makes for quite a cacophony indeed. But we are not done by a long shot.
On the tenth day of Christmas, the true love is back with his most insane gift yet – ten lords a-leaping. It is not clear to me (or to any other person with a functioning brain) what the use of ten leaping men is, but I do know that leaping men must have room to leap. Thus they will be competing with the dancing ladies, unless our house or yard is big enough to separate the Dance Marathon from the Pole Vault event. Not only that, but we also now have 27 new persons to board and feed. I suppose that is where the five gold rings come in.
But there are more people – 23 more people, to be precise – coming to our party. On the eleventh day of Christmas, the true love sends over eleven pipers piping. Great – more noise. And the next day – fortunately for us, the last day of Christmas – we get more noise in the form of twelve drummers drumming. I don’t know about you, but I have noticed that most drummers in bands are on the mentally unstable side. But even if they are not like “Animal” on the Muppets, they are at least very noisy and full of limitless energy – not something we need more of at this point.
Now can you see what our residence would be like with eggs all over the place, 40 people leaping, dancing, drumming, piping, and milking, and a whole flock of many kinds of birds, including one partridge singing “I Think I Love You”? It would mean utter chaos, and unless the receiver of gifts is one of those rare people who can endure any circumstance, it would be enough to drive most of us out of our minds. In fact, I am firmly convinced that the true love does not love the recipient of his gifts at all – he only wants to torture them.
And to top all of this off, we have to hear people sing about such a mindless scenario to a tune that goes on and on and doesn’t change even once over the course of twelve verses! I hope you will now agree with me that the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is indeed the most annoying and implausible Christmas song ever written.

*Author’s Note: There is some conjecture that this song is French in origin. This alone may offer all the explanation we need.

**Author’s Note: The author has learned by experience to beware of story-songs. They tend to be very sappy and almost invariably come with a forgettable tune, even if they are sung instead of spoken over soft music.