It first appeared in print in 1780, in a small English children’s book, and it was a forfeits game. Somebody sings the list, the next person repeats it and adds to it, and whoever fumbles a line pays a penalty.
The tune came later, and Frederic Austin arranged the version everybody sings now in 1909. That’s where that long drawn-out delivery of the fifth gift comes from.
By then the song was well over a century old and had been sung in dozens of variant forms. That’s why nobody is entirely certain what several of the gifts originally were.
This song is a favorite of mine, and it has nothing to do with the tune. It’s a party game wearing a love song’s clothes, and the harder you look at the gifts the stranger and funnier they get. Most carols fall apart under that kind of poking, and this one gets better every time I do it.
Below is one line per gift, no repetition, because the cumulative version means the twelfth verse contains the previous eleven and reading it in full is about a thousand words of the same thing. Click any line to jump to its card.
Traditional, first printed 1780 · tap a gift to read about it
On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to meA partridge in a pear tree
On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to meTwo turtle doves
On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to meThree French hens
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love sent to meFour calling birds
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love sent to meFive gold rings On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love sent to meSix geese a-laying On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to meSeven swans a-swimming
On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love sent to meEight maids a-milking On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love sent to meNine ladies dancing
On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love sent to meTen lords a-leaping On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to meEleven pipers piping On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to meTwelve drummers drumming
Is The Twelve Days of Christmas a secret Catholic code?
Every December somebody forwards the claim that the song is a coded catechism, written so persecuted English Catholics could teach doctrine in secret. Two turtle doves for the testaments, three French hens for the theological virtues, and so on down to twelve drummers for the points of the Apostles’ Creed.
It’s a good story and there’s no evidence for it. The idea appears to have turned up in the late twentieth century and spread through email in the 1990s. That’s roughly two hundred years after the song was first printed. Nothing in the historical record connects it to recusant Catholics, and none of the doctrines allegedly encoded were disputed between English Catholics and Protestants in the first place. That would make the exercise pointless as a secret code.
The likelier explanation is duller and better. It’s a nonsense list built for a memory game, and the gifts escalate absurdly because absurd is easier to remember and funnier to fail at.
That legend gets harder to defend every December. It hangs on because it sounds meaningful, and a claim that sounds meaningful travels a lot faster than one somebody has checked. The memory game is the better story anyway, and it has the advantage of having happened. The song also has a modern accountant. Since 1984 a bank has published an annual Christmas Price Index costing all the gifts at current rates, partly as an economics lesson and partly because somebody realized it makes excellent December press. The birds are cheap. The people aren’t.
What does a partridge in a pear tree mean?
The opening gift is the only one that repeats in every verse. That means anybody singing the full song says it twelve times and is thoroughly sick of the bird by the end.
Partridges are ground birds. They nest on the ground, feed on the ground, and when startled they explode upward for a short distance and then land again, on the ground. A partridge in a pear tree is a partridge in the wrong place.
The usual explanation is linguistic. The French for partridge is perdrix, pronounced roughly per-dree, and one theory holds that an English version of the song absorbed a French refrain and turned the bird’s own name into a tree. If that’s right, the first gift is a partridge, twice, because somebody misheard.
The gift is also the cheapest thing in the song by a wide margin and the giver leads with it. That’s a courtship strategy of questionable merit.
What the bird does have going for it is the sound. The line has a shape that resolves at the end of every verse and gives the singer a place to arrive. Whoever assembled the song understood that a repeated closing beat makes a long list survivable.
If you’re keeping score, the true love has now given one bird and one item of horticulture, and eleven days of considerably worse ideas are ahead.
What do the two turtle doves mean?
Not turtles. The turtle dove takes its name from its call, a soft rolling coo that older English rendered as turr-turr, and the Latin name for the bird is that same noise written down twice.
They mate in long-term pairs and are conspicuously affectionate about it. That’s why they’ve been shorthand for devoted couples since antiquity and appear in that role in the Song of Solomon and in Shakespeare. So as a romantic gesture this one is unusually well chosen. Two birds that stay together, given to a person you’re courting, is about as clear as a symbol gets without a written note attached. Now the gift is also unintentionally poignant. European turtle dove populations have collapsed over recent decades, hit by habitat loss and hunting along their migration routes, and the bird that once stood for constancy is now on conservation red lists.
There’s a period detail worth knowing too. A pair of doves was the offering prescribed for people who couldn’t afford a lamb. That puts a small class marker on the second day. This is a gift with a modest price and an enormous amount of meaning attached. That’s a better trick than anything that arrives later in the song.
The doves are the one gift I’d defend without a joke attached. They’re cheap and they mean something, and I like that kind of present. It also makes me a little sad that the bird standing for constancy now needs protecting.
Day two is the high point of the true love’s judgment. It’s downhill from here and the slope steepens considerably around day eight.
What are the three French hens?
These are livestock, and the adjective is doing real work.
French poultry breeds were prized in England as luxury birds, and giving somebody three of them in the eighteenth century was closer to giving somebody a small productive asset than a pet. The Faverolles and the Houdan are the breeds usually named, both continental, both bred for the table and for laying.
That makes day three the first gift with an obvious economic argument behind it. Doves are a symbol. Hens are breakfast, indefinitely, and eventually more hens.
It’s also the point where the recipient’s household starts to have a problem. One partridge is an oddity. Two doves are a decoration. Three hens require somewhere to live, something to eat, and somebody to deal with them every morning for the rest of their lives. Nobody in the song ever addresses the housing question. That becomes conspicuous by about day seven and outright absurd by day twelve.
The number three is also the most natural stopping point in any list. That’s why so many jokes, fairy tales and rhetorical structures use it. The song sails straight past it, and that refusal to stop where the pattern wants to stop is a large part of why it’s funny.
What is a colly bird?
This is the first gift where the modern words are almost certainly wrong. Early printed versions have colly birds, and colly is an old English word meaning black, from coal. A colly bird is a blackbird. The word fell out of use, singers heard something that no longer made sense, and it drifted toward calling. That does at least describe a thing birds do.
That drift matters, because it’s how oral tradition works. A song passed by ear for a century will repair anything that stops making sense, and the repair is usually plausible instead of correct. Blackbirds also carry a period association that calling birds don’t. They were eaten. There’s a well-known nursery rhyme involving a considerable number of them baked into a pastry, and while that particular dish is more spectacle than recipe, blackbirds appeared on tables.
So the fourth gift may be dinner instead of decoration. That fits the pattern of the surrounding days better than songbirds do.
Either way the recipient now has ten birds, a tree, and no visible plan.
Why are the five gold rings sung that way?
The most famous line in the song, the one everybody bellows, and possibly not jewelry at all.
The theory that gets taken seriously is that the rings are birds. The ring-necked pheasant has a distinct collar, and other birds carry similar markings, and a run of five bird gifts followed by two more bird gifts is a much more coherent list than five bird gifts, an abrupt detour into a jeweller’s, and then birds again.
Read that way, the first seven days are entirely poultry and the song has a clean structure. Read the other way, day five is the giver suddenly spending an enormous amount of money and then reverting to geese. The reason the line stands out at all is musical instead of historical. Frederic Austin’s 1909 arrangement gave it that slow held delivery, and it’s now impossible to sing the song without the fifth gift becoming an event. A single arranger’s choice permanently changed how millions of people perform a piece from 1780. That’s a useful thing to know for anyone who thinks tradition is fixed. The most recognizable moment in a very old song isn’t old. Whether metal or bird, it’s the only gift in the twelve that a person could sell easily. That makes it the one sensible thing the true love does across the entire fortnight.
What do the six geese a-laying mean?
Note the participle. Not six geese. Six geese in the act of laying. That’s a specification about productivity. A goose in lay is worth considerably more than a goose, and the phrasing tells you these are working animals delivered at their most valuable moment. It’s the most commercially literate gift in the song. Geese were also the standard English festive bird long before turkey arrived, so there’s a seasonal joke buried in giving somebody six of them and specifying that they’re laying instead of roasting.
The practical problem escalates sharply here. Geese are large, loud, territorial, and willing to fight a human being. Six of them isn’t a gift, it’s a security installation. Anyone who’s had a goose chase them across a field understands that the recipient’s feelings on day six are complicated. This is also where the song crosses from things you keep in a cage to things that need land. The gifts have been scaling in obligation since day one, and nobody involved seems to have noticed.
Day six is where I’d start sending packages back. I wouldn’t mind a hen. Six territorial birds that’ll go for your ankles tell me the giver has never spent five minutes near a goose.
Who owns the seven swans a-swimming?
Here the true love commits what amounts to a crime. In England, unmarked mute swans on open water have belonged to the Crown since medieval times, with two livery companies holding ancient rights to some of the rest. Swan ownership was a matter of royal grant, and taking one you had no right to was a serious offense. So a person handing over seven swans in eighteenth-century England is either extremely well connected or in a great deal of trouble.
Swans were also food, and prestige food. A roast swan was a centerpiece at aristocratic feasts, and the point of it wasn’t flavor, which by most accounts is ordinary. The point was that you were permitted to have one.
They’re also enormous, aggressive, extremely strong, and will defend water they consider theirs against anything including a person. Seven of them arriving at a private house is closer to an infestation than a present.
Day seven ends the run of birds. The recipient now has twenty-three of them, is presumably not sleeping, and the true love is about to make everything considerably worse by moving on to people.
Who were the eight maids a-milking?
Eight maids a-milking is where a lot of people stop finding the song charming, and they’re right to. The first seven gifts are objects and animals. The eighth is human beings, listed in a sequence with poultry, counted the same way, and given away. Whatever the intent in 1780, that’s what the line says.
Milkmaids were among the lowest-paid workers in rural England, doing hard physical labor twice a day, every day, in cold buildings. The job also carried an odd cultural glamour, partly because dairy workers exposed to cowpox were visibly unscarred by smallpox. That produced a lasting association between milkmaids and clear skin.
That observation, incidentally, is what led Edward Jenner toward the smallpox vaccine. A throwaway line in a Christmas song touches the edge of an enormously consequential event in medical history. Without livestock, the gift is also incomplete. You can’t milk anything without a cow, and eight of those come with eight sizeable animals and everything they require. Nobody mentions that.
This verse is a problem as well. A list that counts working women in the same breath as the poultry is uncomfortable however old it is, and I don’t think the age of a line excuses what it says. The Jenner connection is the only thing on day eight I enjoy. Day eight is the point at which the song stops being a list of presents and becomes a description of a household in crisis.
Who are the nine ladies dancing?
The gifts have now escalated from livestock to entertainment, and the class of the people involved has gone up sharply. Ladies is a narrower word than women or dancers. Whatever is being delivered on day nine involves people of some social standing performing at a private house. That suggests a hired entertainment instead of a permanent addition to the household. That reading rescues the last five days somewhat. Days eight through twelve may not be human beings handed over as property but a series of increasingly extravagant performances. That’s a very different and much more sensible gift. It also fits the season. The twelve days of Christmas were a real holiday period in which ordinary work stopped and entertainment filled it: dancing, music, mumming, and a great deal of drinking. Hiring performers for the household was exactly what wealthy people did during that fortnight.
Under that reading the song is describing an escalating party. That’s considerably funnier and explains why the numbers keep climbing. The recipient still has twenty-three birds and eight employees, but at least somebody is dancing.
What are the ten lords a-leaping?
Ten members of the nobility, jumping, in your house. It’s the single most absurd image in the song and it’s absurd on purpose. The list has been escalating in expense and social rank since day one, and by day ten the giver has run out of things to buy and started acquiring aristocrats. There’s a plausible historical anchor. Morris dancing and other traditional English forms involve a great deal of leaping, and the Christmas period was when such performances happened. Ten men leaping in a hall is a real thing that occurred, though the participants were rarely lords. The word lords is the joke. It’s deliberately the wrong class of person for the activity. Aristocrats didn’t perform for other people’s households. The line is funny for that reason, and it’s survived two and a half centuries. The lords are the part of the song I love most. Somebody in the eighteenth century understood that the funniest thing you can do to an aristocrat is make him jump around in a stranger’s hall, and the joke still makes me laugh every time. It’s also the most expensive line in the modern price index by a distance, since the compilers price it as professional dancers and there’s no cheap way to buy ten of anything skilled. Day ten is where the song fully abandons any pretense of being a courtship and becomes an arms race conducted by one person against nobody.
What are the eleven pipers piping?
Eleven musicians, arriving at a house that already contains twenty-three birds, eight dairy workers, nine dancers and ten leaping noblemen. Pipes in eighteenth-century England covered a range of instruments, from simple whistles to bagpipes to the small pipes used in dance music. Whichever is meant, eleven of them playing at the same time in an enclosed space is quite an experience. Musicians were a normal part of the Christmas period and waits, the town musicians who played through the season, were an established institution. So the gift is grounded in something real, unlike the lords. What makes it work as comedy is volume. The song has been escalating in cost, in social rank and in physical space, and on day eleven it escalates in noise. There’s no reasonable arrangement of a house in which eleven pipers are an improvement. It also sets up the ending. The song needs one more level of intensity and it’s already used up expense, class and space. That leaves it exactly one option.
Twelve drummers.
What do the twelve drummers drumming mean?
The final gift is the loudest possible object delivered in the largest quantity so far. That’s exactly the right way to end. Drums in that period were linked to the military, to public announcement and to processions. A drummer was how you got a crowd’s attention before anybody had a better method, and twelve of them in a private house is a joke about scale that needs no explanation in any century.
Structurally, day twelve is doing something a writer should notice. The song had to end on the biggest number and the biggest noise at the same time, because a cumulative list has no natural conclusion. It stops when it can no longer be topped.
The final verse is also the payoff of the game. By the twelfth round the singer has to recite all twelve gifts in order, at speed, without error. That’s the point at which most players fail and pay their forfeit. The song is engineered to break you at exactly this moment.
Add it all up and the true love has delivered three hundred and sixty-four items across the twelve days, if you count every repetition, which the accountants who publish the annual price index do. Twenty-three of them are the same partridge situation happening over and over.
As courtship it’s a disaster, and I’d have sent the whole lot back by day six. As a memory game it’s close to perfect, and it’s outlasted every carol written to be solemn. I like the version where somebody fumbles the geese on the twelfth round and has to pay up.