Mention “Twelve Days of Christmas” and more often than not someone will start singing “On the first day of Christmas …”. The text of this nursery rhyme, which is most likely based on a memory-and-forfeits game, dates to the early 18th century, and first found its way into print in the children’s book Mirth without Mischief, published in London in 1780. The text has undergone a few modifications since then, and while the melody was not published until 1909 by English composer Frederic Austin, possibly based on a traditional folk melody, there are few Americans who do not know both the text and the tune. And at the conclusion of the second stanza about the two turtle doves — that’s about all most people know — the singer sometimes begins to expound on the Catholic background and the true meaning of the presents “my true love sent to me”. The lyrics of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, so the story goes, were intended as a catechism song to help young English Catholics learn the tenets of their faith at a time when practicing Catholicism was against the law, i.e., between 1558 and 1829. The partridge is Jesus Christ, the two turtle doves represent the Old and New Testament, the three French hens the virtues of faith, hope, and love or charity, the four calling birds the four gospels and so on. None of this makes sense, of course, since the items listed in the lyrics are as much part of Protestant theology as they are part of Catholicism, which means that there was no need to encode them.
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