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. 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. 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.

The Twelve Days of Christmas | English Heritage The Twelve Days of Christmas | English Heritage

An anonymous "antiquarian", writing in 1867, speculated that " pear-tree" is a corruption of French perdrix ( [pɛʁ. 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. The song has been recorded by the Muppets five different times, featuring different Muppets in different roles each time. The lyrics given here are from Frederic Austin's 1909 publication that established the current form of the carol.A number of later publications state that Austin's music for "five gold rings" is an original addition to an otherwise traditional melody.

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

This wording must have been opaque to many even in the 19th century: " canary birds", "colour'd birds", "curley birds", and "corley birds" are found in its place. Les Douze Mois" ("The Twelve Months") (also known as "La Perdriole"—"The Partridge") [36] is another similar cumulative verse from France that has been likened to The Twelve Days of Christmas.Peter and Iona Opie suggest that "if '[t]he partridge in the peartree' is to be taken literally it looks as if the chant comes from France, since the Red Leg partridge, which perches in trees more frequently than the common partridge, was not successfully introduced into England until about 1770". A special Creature Comforts orchestral arrangement of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" was made by British animator Nick Park and Aardman Animations. 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.

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

On one of these sheets, nearly a century old, it is entitled "An Old English Carol," but it can scarcely be said to fall within that description of composition, being rather fitted for use in playing the game of "Forfeits," to which purpose it was commonly applied in the metropolis upwards of forty years since. 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 album My Little Pony: It's a Pony Kind of Christmas. However, a 20th-century variant has "my true love gave to me"; this wording has become particularly common in North America. The index has been humorously criticised for not accurately reflecting the true cost of the gifts featured in the Christmas carol.Despite this, other theories about the word's origin are also found in the literature, such as that the word is a corruption of French collet ("ruff"), or of "coloured".

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Multiple sources confirm that it is a dialectal word, found in Somerset and elsewhere, meaning "black", so "colly birds" are blackbirds.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. According to The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, "Suggestions have been made that the gifts have significance, as representing the food or sport for each month of the year. The Ray Conniff Singers recorded a traditional version in 1962, appearing on the album We Wish You a Merry Christmas.