With twelve days between now and Christmas, you may have seen some familiar memes appearing on your feeds. Jokes about the lyrics of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” have become a sign of the season.
But the “twelve days of Christmas” are actually supposed to begin on December 25 and end January 6, representing the time between Christ’s birth and the arrival of the magi. The most merry of meme-makers tend to conveniently ignore this when they bring up the song’s many, many birds and chuckle over the idea of presenting your true love with lords-a-leaping.
For the past few years, the PNC Index has calculated the cost of all of the gifts in the song and adjusted for inflation. This year’s total was $201,972.66—geese and swans have really gotten expensive, while the price of hiring milkmaids for a few hours has remained relatively stable.
Historians guess that the lyrics of this song have evolved quite a bit over time, but there is no world, no past time period and no Doctor Strange imagined future in which they really made a ton of sense. That’s because they were never supposed to. It is likely that “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was actually a memory game where participants would sit around in a circle and try to sing it without forgetting anything.
It’s kind of nice to imagine celebrants in prior centuries marking the season clustered together and singing as a means of entertainment on some of the darkest nights of the year. And when we think about how families tend to mark the Christmas season now, with a few minutes of frenzied thrashing that ends with a wrapping paper mess, you’ve got to wonder if those people understood something about Christmas that we don’t come close to getting at.
Conversation starter: Can you think of a family-oriented Christmas tradition that you might like to start or try?