Last Christmas, I laid out the “correct” way to count the Twelve Days of Christmas—if you want them to come out correctly at the end of the traditional Christmas season, Twelfth Night.
This year, I’m getting a lot of forwards of an email that explains how the song, The Twelve Days of Christmas, was a secret Catholic catechism during a period of persecution. It turns out that no serious historical scholar has ever found any evidence for this. Reverend Harold Stockert came up with the idea and started spreading the rumor in 1969! While the numerical and symbolic association can easily be made, apparently it’s just a light-hearted Christmas song with no hidden meanings, after all.
It is a nice old ditty, but, like almost every Christmas song, people either love it or hate it. I’ve developed a few “rules” for the song that I try to observe whenever possible during the Christmas season: Continue reading
