What would the festive season be without The Twelve Days of Christmas, that zany carol that makes our most inappropriate and thoughtless choices of gifts look positively inspired. I mean, really, what sort of lunatic would burden their main squeeze with 10 lords a-leaping, six geese a-laying or 12 drummers drumming, let alone a partridge in a pear tree?
The carol is thought to be English, possibly by way of France, and the melody we know today that allows children all over the world to annoy festively hungover adults is attributed to the English composer Frederic Austin, who hopefully inhabits his own special hell, pecked by assorted birds and driven to distraction by nimble nobles and persistent percussionists.
The titular 12 days refer to the period from Christmas day to the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6, or the 12th day). The Epiphany is so named for the 'true love' of the song who, after a dozen increasingly outlandish gifts, realised he had run out of cash and ought to stop. The feast, naturally, featured colly birds, French hens, turtle doves and a nice roast partridge with pear glaze.
It's a somewhat contentious carol for those who take the art seriously. Yuletide cheer has been known to descend into yanking of hair over whether it's '10 pipers piping' or '10 fiddlers fiddling', '11 lords a-leaping' or '11 dames a-dancing', and 'four colly birds', 'four calling birds' or 'four mockingbirds'. In Britain, the true love 'sent'' the gifts, in the United States he 'gave' them.
Those festive funsters, the French, prefer a more ribald version in which the lover serves up 'a good stuffing without bones, two breasts of veal, three joints of beef, four pigs' trotters, five legs of mutton, six partridges with cabbage, seven spitted rabbits, eight plates of salad, nine dishes for a chapter of canons, 10 full casks, 11 beautiful full-breasted maidens and 12 musketeers with their swords'.
The Scottish manage to include a parrot, plovers, starlings, goldspinks, bulls, hinds, stalks of corn and, unaccountably, an Arabian baboon. In Australia, expect a Rolf Harris wobbleboard version, complete with kangaroos, koalas and other assorted antipodean critters. The twisted minds behind the cartoon South Park had a crack, with a stuttering, crippled character named Jimmy Valmer performing the most tortured and endless version ever. And for those feeling a bit gassy from the aforementioned French feast, there's even Nasty Santa Presents Farting Elves: The Twelve Days of Christmas, which requires no further explanation.