Dear Friends,
If you are reading this week’s Topics on its publication date – Friday, December 27 – happy third day of Christmas. I’m in Granville for a couple of days enjoying time with our family. It’s been joyful chaos since I arrived home late on Christmas morning.
Yesterday, as I walked Bernie downtown for a “leg-stretcher,” we passed several Christmas trees already put out to the curb. These are the same trees I saw freshly-cut tied to the tops of cars driving into town the day after Thanksgiving. Their special time indoors has come to an end.
Christmas is already over for some people. The radio stations that converted to an “all Christmas – all the time” format have returned to their regular programming. Amazon, the US Postal Service, and brick-and-mortar stores are all handling returns. And we’re on the brink of a New Year.
Not so fast, I want to say. Christmas is twelve days long. We have at least one song that reminds us of the tradition – The Twelve Days of Christmas – the 18th century English carol celebrating true love, gift-giving and birds.
Originally published in 1780, it was a children’s memory game, and the words were chanted as each player attempted to recite the lengthening list of gifts. The melody was added in 1909 by Frederic Austin, who presumably gave the middle line its elongated flourish, “fiiivvve gooollld riiinnngs”— a detail best left off the composer’s resume. If it had never become a song, the multitude of leaping lords and milking maids might have disappeared completely right along with the traditional twelve days.
Some people love the song, and there are terrific versions of it – the one sung by John Denver of the Muppets is a classic with Miss Piggy claiming the five gold rings – and Straight No Chaser’s send up of the song still makes me smile every time I hear it, even though it’s been around since 1998. Others describe it as the Christmas equivalent of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
One year (2013, in fact), the independent writer Pamela Forsythe “wondered about the preponderance of fowl [in the list] – six of the 12 days feature gifts of birds: partridge, turtle doves, French hens, colly or calling birds, geese, and swans.” She asked, “Aside from the hens and geese, which could provide eggs, what was the recipient to do with all the rest? Stock an aviary?”
And then she went on to compose her own fresh set of lyrics. Here they are:
The Twelve Smart Days of Christmas
On the 12th day of Christmas my true love gave to me:
Twelve consoling kisses,
Eleven geeks-a-helping,
Ten friends advising,
Nine coders weeping,
Eight teens-a-texting,
Seven new devices,
Six thrilling e-books,
Five ibuprofens,
Four “Downton” downloads,
Three apps to save time,
Two tiny earbuds, and
A smart phone delivered by drone
If you were to write your own list of gifts for the Twelve Days of Christmas, what would the list include? Fowl? Electronic devices? Experiences? Something for you to ponder in these days between December 25 and January 5.
Blessings,
Stephen Applegate