Merrily Unhinged Christmas Rant

I saw this after smoking a huge bowl:

I should note that I’m not back to using Twitter. It was posted as a screenshot in the Dumb Bitch Juice meme group. That’s not important. What is important is that after forty-two years of relentless exposure to the song, my misunderstanding of the events of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was corrected.

The items described are not given to the recipient one time. Each gift is received every day after its first appearance in the song.

As I did the math in silent horror, I showed the tweet to my husband. He’d had the song all wrong, too. We’d both believed that on the first day of Christmas, the true love gave the singer a partridge in a pear tree. On day two, the true love gave the singer two turtle doves.

But, as seen in the above tweet, those aren’t what the lyrics imply at all.

On the first day of Christmas
My true love gave to me
A partridge in a pear tree.

On the second day of Christmas
My true love gave to me
Two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

I cannot overstate how much I dislike this song. If you don’t have kids, you don’t know the fear of opening that folded copy paper program and learning that you’ll be subjected to Mrs. Sussman’s second-grade class singing all twelve, increasingly lengthy, verses. At the elementary school my kids attended, the teachers dressed up in costumes and performed an interpretive dance version at the Christmas assembly every year. The overweight male principal wore a tutu to represent the “nine ladies dancing” to the kind of laughter that should be solely reserved for Eddie Murphy’s return to stand-up.

If you aren’t a parent, you’ve been on the other side of those nightmares. Anyone living in the dominant christonormative cultural narrative of our times has been in Mrs. Sussman’s second-grade class. Their teacher has danced to the Muppets’ version, with Miss Piggy wailing “Five GoooOOOOOOoooold Rings!” and the ensuing “ba dum dum dum.” Some of you have performed it in American Sign Language with your church youth group. You never learned to count to thirteen.

The Western world is hostage to this song. Is it any wonder that some of us haven’t thought deeply about it? Who among us hasn’t dissociated around day seven? I had to google what twelve even was because, although I’ve heard the song roughly nineteen times per year since before the fall of the Soviet Union, I couldn’t remember a time when I’d heard it all the way to the end.

“Is it really a hundred and eighty-four?” I asked my husband, whose astonished expression mirrored my own. “A partridge in a pear tree.”

“Stop,” said Mr. Jen. “Do you get the tree, too, or is he putting the partridge in a tree you already own?”

“It says ‘my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree. I think there are also multiple trees.”

I’d already known that the song was a bird-heavy list. The birds get a lot of social media attraction every year, but the trees go largely uncommented upon. By the end of the song, you not only have twelve partridges but twelve trees for them, as well. An orchard.

We started adding up the birds to make sure. Twelve partridges. Twenty-two turtle doves. Thirty french hens. The weird thing is the higher the number of birds, the larger and more aggressive the species. You start with the teensy little partridge and end with the giant swan. Which you get thirty-five of, by the way.

Of course, if you paid attention to the song, you already knew that. For those of us who did not pay attention, who zone out and mentally listen to Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” until it’s time to politely clap, it comes as a real shock.

I became somewhat obsessed with the lyrics at this point. There are eight maids a’milking, but no mention of the cows or goats.

“You don’t get to keep the cows,” I explained to Mr. Jen, whose interest in the subject had significantly waned. “You just get the maids a’milking. When they’re done a’milking, the cows go somewhere else.”

“Who are these people?” Mr. Jen asked. “How did they get involved?”

Mystified, I totaled them up, too. You only get twelve drummers once. When it comes to drummers, twelve is enough. But you end up with thirty lords a’leaping.

“Do people outnumber the birds in this song?” I asked, trying to do the math in my head despite being a writer. “I think the people outnumber the birds.”

Forty maids a’milking. Thirty-six ladies dancing. Thirty lords a’leaping. Twelve drummers drumming. 118 people in total.

“The people are outnumbered 184 to 118,” I said, frantically tapping on my phone’s calculator app.

“Please leave,” Mr. Jen begged. “I am trying to sleep.”

Humanity isn’t unique. I’m certain I’m not the only person who ever misunderstood the gifts correlating to their specifically numbered day only. Judging by the tweet that sent me down this spiral, I’m not the only person who’s taken the time to math out the lyrics. But I’m afraid to Google for other people’s experiences. This feels like a journey that, once embarked upon, must be completed alone. It is yet another sliver of childhood revealed by life to be a lie.

My theater’s holiday cabaret is this evening.

They will be performing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”