ORIGIN
OF "THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS"
An
Underground Catechism
You're all
familiar with the Christmas song, "The Twelve Days
of Christmas" I think. To most it's a delightful
nonsense rhyme set to music. But it had a quite serious
purpose when it was written.
It is a good
deal more than just a repetitious melody with pretty
phrases and a list of strange gifts.
Catholics in
England during the period 1558 to 1829, when Parliament
finally emancipated Catholics in England, were prohibited
from ANY practice of their faith by law - private OR
public. It was a crime to BE a Catholic.
"The
Twelve Days of Christmas" was written in England as
one of the "catechism songs" to help young
Catholics learn the tenets of their faith - a memory aid,
when to be caught with anything in *writing* indicating
adherence to the Catholic faith could not only get you
imprisoned, it could get you hanged, or shortened by a
head - or hanged, drawn and quartered, a rather peculiar
and ghastly punishment I'm not aware was ever practiced
anywhere else.
Hanging,
drawing and quartering involved hanging a person by the
neck until they had almost, but not quite, suffocated to
death; then the party was taken down from the gallows,
and disembowelled while still alive; and while the
entrails were still lying on the street, where the
executioners stomped all over them, the victim was tied
to four large farm horses, and literally torn into five
parts - one to each limb and the remaining torso.
The songs gifts
are hidden meanings to the teachings of the faith. The
"true love" mentioned in the song doesn't refer
to an earthly suitor, it refers to God Himself.
The
"me" who receives the presents refers to every
baptized person.
The partridge
in a pear tree is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. In the
song, Christ is symbolically presented as a mother
partridge which feigns injury to decoy predators from her
helpless nestlings, much in memory of the expression of
Christ's sadness over the fate of Jerusalem:
"Jerusalem! Jerusalem! How often would I have
sheltered thee under my wings, as a hen does her chicks,
but thou wouldst not have it so..."
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