If the coming week or so becomes a rather interminable and indeterminate blur, then perhaps frequent recourse to singing The Twelve Days of Christmas may serve as a reminder of what day it is and when to take the decorations down. It might even bring some spiritual instruction along the way.
This popular and much-parodied song first appeared in 1780, in a children’s book entitled Mirth Without Mischief. It seems originally to have come from France, where earlier versions exist, and it is perhaps significant that the partridge, which appears as the final gift sent by the true love, was introduced into England from there in the 1770s. Although on the face of it a simple memory game for children, scholars have suggested that it may have contained hidden messages, rather like other nursery rhymes — Sing a song of sixpence referring to Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, and Ring-a-ring o’ roses to the Great Plague of London in 1665, for example.
