The Twelve Dels of Christmas: My Festive Tales from Life and Only Fools

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Many American Christians still celebrate the traditional liturgical seasons of Advent and Christmas, especially Amish, Anglo-Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Mennonites, Methodists, Moravians, Nazarenes, Orthodox Christians, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics. In Anglicanism, the designation of the "Twelve Days of Christmas" is used liturgically in the Episcopal Church in the US, having its own invitatory antiphon in the Book of Common Prayer for Matins. [4] You'll notice that many "12 Days of Christmas" gifts can be food-related, and we're certainly not objecting. Keeping your gift exchange edible works well no matter who your intended audience is. For the first verse, bake up anything that has pear as the main ingredient, like a fresh pear cobbler. Wrap your baked goods up in a holiday-themed disposable container and add a festive bow to complete your gift. The partridge in a pear tree represents Jesus, the Son of God, whose birthday we celebrate on the first day of Christmas. Christ is symbolically presented as a mother partridge, the only bird that will die to protect its young. Evans, Martin Marix (2002). The Twelve Days of Christmas. White Plains, New York: Peter Pauper Press. ISBN 978-0-88088-776-2. OCLC 57044650. Wells, Robin Headlam (2005). Shakespeare's Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-82438-5. OCLC 62132881.

The Adoration of the Magi, Fresco at the Lower Church of the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi in Assisi, Italy. 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 [ edit ] a) differences in wording, ignoring capitalisation and punctuation, are indicated in italics (including permutations, where for example the 10th day of Austin's version becomes the 9th day here); In the United States, Christmas Day is a federal holiday which holds additional religious significance for Christians. [23] 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 mThe 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. [101]

The theory suggests that each gift represented a tenet of faith, and the song was sung by young catholics as a memory aid to remember various aspects of their religion. Collins, Ace; Clint Hansen (2003). Stories Behind the Great Traditions of Christmas. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan. ISBN 978-0-310-24880-4. OCLC 52311813.

These types of songs were common in 1800s English playgrounds, and would normally involve children taking turns to sing all of the previously sung lyrics, before adding the next line. If someone got the lyrics wrong, there would usually be a forfeit. 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 earliest versions, the word on is not present at the beginning of each verse—for example, the first verse begins simply "The first day of Christmas". On was added in Austin's 1909 version, and became very popular thereafter. These lyrics were published in England in 1780 without music, and many composers would go on to write tunes for the words over the next 100 or so years. Who gets their true love 8 maids [who are] milking [a cow]? and where do you even get eight milkmaids from? Are they there by choice? Do we need to call the police?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.