A Few Notes on the Twelve Days of Christmas

Like so many other aspects of ritual that populate a realm of hazy detail this year’s holiday meditations led to asking: what exactly are the twelve days of Christmas? And, as usual the answer isn’t exactly easy.  In Christian custom the twelve days bridge Christmas and the Epiphany, when God, manifest in human being as Jesus Christ, is celebrated. Depending on the denomination some reckonings begin on December 25 and end on January 5 while others go from the 26^th to the 6^th. This period, also known as Christmastide, culminates on the Twelfth Night which marks the coming of the epiphany and the traditional feast and merrymaking that attend the occasion.

Further complicating the picture is how dates are offset within different denominations depending on whether or not they are aligned with the Julian or the Gregorian calendars.

In exploring the Twelve Days of Christmas the well known song inevitably comes under consideration. "The Twelve Days of Christmas is an English Christmas carol that enumerates in the manner of a cumulative song a series of increasingly grand gifts given on each of the twelve days of Christmas.” (Wikipedia) and the numerous variants keep step with multiplicity of detail.  A dozen or more versions of the words, from Mirth Without Merriment (1780) to Swortzell’s (1966) present well known and some lesser known characters - mainly in the latter stanzas - in differing sequence. Things are comparatively stable through seven swans a swimming; at eight an 1842 rendition has ladies dancing instead of the more regularly encountered maids a milking. Nine through twelve each, at different times, see ladies dancing, lords a leaping, drummers drumming and even, in the 1867 Cliftonian verse, badgers baiting. The 1909 Austin verse is the one familiar to many Americans.

Understanding the changes within the song’s words throughout the past few centuries

sheds light on variations within illustrations and elucidates subtle semantic conundrums such as “four calling birds” – it was originally “collie birds”, collie being an English regional term for “black”. See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Days_of_Christmas_%28song%29

Of the narrative's numerous visual treatments the 1949 interpretation by Ilonka Karasz appeals for its sensitive patterning and delicately poised forms which imbue the pictures with a lyrical quintessence.  The successive segments of the song are rendered with subtle shifts of balance among the characters as they increasingly crowd the page with their well ordered ranks. The illustrator’s playfulness abounds but is especially endearing in the movement of the five gold rings. Finding them in Karasz’ densely patterned drawings, stylized in her native Hungarian visual language, becomes a bit of a game.