9 Ridiculous Things about "The 12 Days of Christmas"

you want to go a full dad joke. But uh, it makes you wonder what the true love and this song is thinking right, like like what are you supposed to do with all this menagerie of birds? So we did some digging this week and it turns out the answer is you eat them, or at least that's the prevailing theory, because most of the birds of the song were served at holiday feasts in sixteenth century Europe. I've actually not thought about that. So so this means the

song is basically just a menu, right pretty much. And if you're the kind of person who's listening to this and your mouth is watering and you're wishing you could recreate this bird centric feast in your own home, well you are in luck because there's a company in England named Hell Farm and it offers something called the twelve bird True Love Roast. I've actually got the order page pulled up here and I want you to see this. Well, uh,

that is something else. I mean, it's kind of like the Urn Ducan on steroids, is the only way I could describe it. Yeah. The company calls it a twelve bird roast because it's made with twelve different kinds of birds, one for each day of Christmas. But they didn't stop at just one of each kind because they're actually forty eight birds crammed into this thing. Eight different types of stuffing as well, but forty eight birds, Lord, this thing

must be enormous. Yeah. And according to the website, the True Love Roast weighs about fifty five pounds and will feed about a hundred and twenty five but it will cost you. It's with a dish, so pretty steep. But on the bright side, delivery is free and each roast comes in its own large wicker hamper, fully prepared and ready to cook. I like the they throw in the hamper to really seal the deal, you know, in case you were on the fence about spending a thousand dollars

on a ton of bird meat. Now you know it's it's worth it. Well. I I like the fact because it's such a clear example of just how bizarre the song really is. I mean, I've probably heard it like a hundred times or more in my life, right, but it never gets any less strange. And I still don't really know anything about this song. And after asking around this week, I realized I'm not the only one who

feels this way. So with the holidays upon us, I thought we could do our part by taking a closer look and then sharing what we consider to be the nine weirdest facts about the twelve Days of Christmas. In fact one is that the song is actually a giant menu, which means we've got eight more to go. Let's dive in. Y Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius.

I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm joined by my good friend Manes Ticketer and on the other side of the soundproof glass chowing down on what he claims are three French hens. I really can't fact check this one, that easily. That's our friend and producer Lull. He does look like he's really enjoying it. He is kind of giving the game away by drinking out of that Popeye's cup. But also joining us today is our researcher pal, Gabe Bluesier.

It's been a little while, Gabe. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, of course, thanks for having me. It's nice to be back. Yeah, we brought Gabe out of exile, but he's actually the one who suggested we zero in on this twelve Days of Christmas theme for today's show. Gave what was your

favorite one as a kid? Actually it was this one, like my family to this thing where we would sing the gifts like one day at a time, So we'd start on December fourteen, singing just the first line the partridge part uh, and then we just keep on one day at a time until Christmas, when we would finally try to get through the whole thing. And I mean emphasis on the try part, like we didn't always make it.

But that is an amazing family tradition. I love that practicing the song and pieces does seem like a good way to actually remember that song. But I think he might be doing it slightly wrong game, to be honest with you, I like that you just heard about my family tradition and already you have improvements for it. That's something I'm here to help, and it it did line up with the fact that I already had on deck, because one thing I always wondered is when exactly are

the twelve Days of Christmas? Like, is that even a real thing? And it turns out it is a real thing. But counterintuitively, the twelve days don't end on Christmas Day. They actually begin on Christmas Day, or at least that's how it works in some forms of Western Christianity, including Catholicism. So according to tradition, the twelve day span is meant to represent the period of time between the birth of Christ and the day that the Three Wise Men brought

him gifts. So if anybody out there really wants to recreate the song or seeing it on the appropriate nights, you would start on December and you would end on January five, or sometimes known as the Twelfth Night. Oh wow, So thirty years of family tradition straight down the drain.

But I'm actually glad we're getting into some of the history of this song that that sets things up nicely from my first fact, which is that the origin of the song itself is still a big mystery, Like The earliest written version was a poem in a book of nursery rhymes called Mirth Without Mischief, and the book was published in England in seventeen eighty. But historians believe the Twelve Days poem is a lot older than that, and

it may have originally come from France. But even though we don't know the exact origin of the song, there are a few theories. The best one is that it started as a memory game that kids would play during those twelve night celebrations you mentioned, And basically kids would get they're in a circle, and they'd go around reciting the poem one verse at a time, much like my family did, until someone made a mistake and the player who messed up would be out of the game, and

the last one standing was the winner. So I I did notice that you called it a poem just now, and you said kids would recite it, not sing it. So was the Twelve Days of Christmas actually written um? Not as a song originally? Yeah, that's right. It actually wasn't set to music until the early twentieth century, so quite a while. And until then it was just a kind of poem called a cumulative verse. So another example would be that nursery rhyme there was an old lady

who swallowed a fly. You know, she keeps swallowing one thing to swallow the other. And pretty much any poem or chant where you use pattern verses like that to sort of build out a narrative that's a cumulative verse. Well you know, you know. My first fact was meant to do some myth busting. So one thing I've always heard, especially online, is that the twelve Days of Christmas is

actually this coded guide to the Catholic faith. So the two turtle drives are are really the Old and New Testaments, the six Gees of Laying or the six Days of Creation and so on. The idea of this kind of stems from the fact that from the sixteenth to nineteenth century, being a Catholic was a crime in Protestant England. So according to legend, Catholic kids would sing the song as a way to learn about and profess their forbidden faith while still kind of keeping it a secret from authorities.

As alluded to earlier, none of this is true that there are actually a couple key points that poke holes in this theory. For starters, there's no reference to the secret history prior to the early ninety nineties, which suggests that the whole thing is just an Internet rumor that that got out of hand. But what's more damning is

that none of the alleged hidden meanings make that much sense. Like, Protestants believe in all the same concepts that the gifts are supposed to represent, So the idea of Catholics having to kind of like hide this or disguise these concepts doesn't really hold that much water. Yeah, that's interesting, all right, Well,

here's a quick one. So we've already discussed how this song reads like a very bird heavy menu, but there's at least one item miss sing from the song that definitely would have been on the table in medieval Europe, and that is mince pie, made from a hearty mix of finely chopped beef, dried fruit, nuts, and spices. These mince pies, or mince meat pies, they became a Christmas

staple in Europe. The pies were traditionally baked in the shape of Jesus's manger, which I'd actually never heard until I was looking into this this week, and a little figure of the baby Jesus would be placed on top of each one, and they must have made a ton of these two because mince pies were actually eaten on

each of the twelve days of Christmas. I can't say why the popular pies didn't make it into the song, but it's probably because a mince pie in a pear tree just doesn't quite have the same ring to it. I don't know how you guys feel. Yeah, that's somehow even less romantic than what we got, Like that is a lot of mince pie. But speaking of which, you know those five golden rings, like, of course one of the few, it's one of the few gifts in the song that isn't a bird, right, Well, surprise, the rings

are in fact also birds. According to bird expert Mike Bergen, the lyric is not a reference to jewelry, but to ring necked pheasants. So as the name implies those birds, they have bands of yellowish feathers that kind of wrap around their necks. Hence the golden rings, which means that the fifth day of Christmas doesn't actually bring this grand romantic gift so much as it does more birds to eat.

It's so much less romantic. The five golden rings line always reminds me of that Eddie Izard like part in his comedy routine where he points out how people just go crazy for that one that but and then they go back to forgetting how the rest of the song goes. But you know, we've got three facts left to go. Let's take a quick break and then we'll get back to it. Welcome back to part time Genius. We're talking about the alarming implications of the twelve Days of Christmas.

All right, Mago, it was your turn when we left off, So what do you got for us next? So I've got another lyrical misnomer that everyone seems to fall for. First, I want to acknowledge that there are lots of different versions of this song, and that's before you even get to the parody version. So in terms of different takes, like some variants include eleven ships of sailing instead of eleven pipers piping, or nine bulls of roaring instead of

nine ladies dancing. But one gift that's present in nearly every version of the song is the one for the fourth day for calling birds, And that seems like a kind of a sad one once you realize that the birds aren't intended as decorations or pets. But as dinner, as we've mentioned before, and it's odd because you normally wouldn't eat a songbird, right, But the original line apparently wasn't for calling birds. It was four collie birds CEO L l i E. It's an archaic word meaning grimy

or or black as suit. And in reality the gift isn't for beautiful songbirds, but it's for blackbirds right to be baked into a pie. That is a pretty different I think, A Well, there's been a lot of talk about bird eating today, and so it falls on me to to put all of that binging in perspective. I think. So, say you want to embark on your own twelve Days of Christmas feast, but you don't have a thousand bucks

lying around for a true love roast. It will be a lot more work and some weird looks from your butcher, but you could definitely put together a similar spread for a whole lot less money. And the amazing part is if you stick to a single serving of each dish and you keep the recipe simple, you actually wouldn't come out too bad nutritionally speaking. So take the first day, for example, a serving of roasted partridge has only about two d or so calories a pair is a mere

nineties six calories. In fact, if you added up modern equivalents for each of the first seven days of the song, including pheasant for the fifth day, you only have a about twenty hundred calories. So you could even eat all twelve dishes in the same day if you want to. And so when you factor in all the activities mentioned for the last five days of the song, you can actually get that count down even lower. So is that

what the song is supposed to be? Like? It's seven days of stuffing your face and then five days of desperately trying to work the way on. I mean, that's kind of what happens in real life, but that that's one popular interpretation that the whole thing is about one big long feast and all the activities going on during it. In fact, there's an article in The Atlantic that really

leans into this theory. So the author actually breaks down the average number of calories you'd burn during thirty minutes of each activity. So, for instance, milking a cow for half an hour would burn about a hundred calories, dancing would shave off closer to two hundred than on the other end of the spectrum, you've got the flute playing, which I don't know, this may surprise you, that would

actually only burn a paltry six eight calories. It seems like doing it very Yeah, it feels like this very intense activity. But you know, if you subtract all those energy expenditures from the twelve course total that we were talking about, you'd wind up with a little over two thousand calories. And while that's still a lot for one meal, it's way better than the forty calories that would make

up the average Thanksgiving dinner. Yeah, that's that's probably closer to what you're looking at for a serving of that twelve bird roast you guys were talking about. It's off forty April, I think, excuse me. And actually that fits in pretty well with my last fact, which is about the ridiculous scale of gift giving that goes on in this song. I mean, because at first you think, okay, twelve days, twelve gifts. That's you know, that's a lavish

number of presents. But it's not unheard of, right, It's it's not worrisome yet. It could this could still be, you know, a semi normal situation. But then you remember the amount increases with the gifts, right, two turtle doves, three french head, all the way up to twelve. So now you're at seventy eight gifts, which is too many.

It is just way and then it hits you, right, this is a cumulative song, like I was saying, So you don't just get the new gift of the day, you also get all the gifts from all the previous days all over, which means that the total number of gifts in the twelve days of Christmas is a whopping three hundred and sixty four. And and I have to add, if you consider the pear trees as separate gifts from the partridges, which really you should, you add another twelve

onto that, so it's really three seventy six. That is insane, especially when you remember that a large portion of those gifts they're live birds exactly. And the most troubling part is that somebody spent a ton of money on those gifts on those birds, like all those live performers. They were booked from multiple full days. That can't be cheap. And this is kind of a bonus fact, I admit, but there's actually a group of economists who crunched the numbers every year to find out just how much this

full suite of gifts would cost. It's called the Christmas Price Index, and it's released by P and C Wealth Management. For it says, these three hundred plus gifts, it would set you back a hundred and fourteen thousand, six hundred fifty one dollars and eighteen cents. And because I know you're wondering the most expensive item on that list, it's surprisingly the seven swansa swimming Apparently swans go for a

little over a thousand bucks apiece. Wow. And and that's even before you have to like find a lake for them. I was actually going to say, like the landscaping fees for this orchard of pear trees that you suddenly own it, it's pretty expensive. Yeah, for as long as the song as it is, like, there's a lot that goes unsaid. Yeah, I mean that's true, but it's also kind of what

I like about it. I mean, the lyrics are so specific, and the more time goes by, the weirder and more out of place they seem to us, and yet we keep right on singing them anyways. It is endearing. But because of that wealth index fact and because this episode was your idea. I really think you deserve the trophy this week, Gave Yeah, And to go along with it, please accept this flock of wild birds that we caught this week, Gabe, you have earned them. Congratulations. Thank you guys.

That is just what my apartment's missing. Yeah all right, well that's gonna do it for today's Part Time Genius. It's so great to have you back on the program, Gave. If you like our little show out there, please be sure to subscribe with the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you go to hear weird facts and maybe leave us a rating or review that would really make our year. From Will, Gave, Little and Me, thank you so much for listening, Have a wonderful holiday, and we'll

see you in the new year. Part Time Genius is a production of I heart Rate. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite show. H