I'd rather just get a nice book...

My mom and I just got back from our morning coffee run to Seattle’s Best. She has the XM radio in her car tuned to an all-Christmas music station, and we heard “The Twelve Days of Christmas” on the way home. A rather boring song, as my mom pointed out, because it’s extremely repetitive and it takes a long time to get through all twelve days. You might as well just START with day twelve, and get the whole thing over with at once:

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me,
Twelve drummers drumming,
Eleven pipers piping,
Ten lords a-leaping,
Nine ladies dancing,
Eight maids a-milking,
Seven swans a-swimming,
Six geese a-laying,
Five golden rings,
Four calling birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves,
And a partridge in a pear tree.

Now, I have to say that if my “true love” gave me all this crap for Christmas, I’d be really peeved. This would obviously come from someone who didn’t know me very well. Where am I supposed to put twenty-three different kinds of birds? Not to mention the fact that the geese are “a-laying,” so I’ve either got to deal with a few dozen goslings, or have goose-egg omelets for breakfast. There are also fifty – yes, FIFTY – people that my true love was kind enough to dump on my doorstep, and I haven’t even washed the sheets on the spare bed or stocked the pantry with extra food. And am I to assume that those eight maids a-milking are bringing their cows along with them? Great. So now I’ve got twenty-three birds, fifty people, and eight cows… PLUS a bunch of drumming and piping, which I imagine will get on my nerves pretty quickly, what with all the leaping and dancing and mooing and squawking. The only decent gift in that entire list is the “five golden rings” – IF, in fact, we’re actually talking about rings. Judging from the obvious theme of those final seven “gifts,” I’d have to guess that a “golden ring” is, in reality, some kind of bird. Which means, of course, that the final tally is: twenty-eight birds, fifty people, eight cows, twenty-three annoying musical instruments, an indeterminate number of baby geese – and oh yeah, a pear tree. I suppose I have to plant that myself…

As my mom was saying in the car, the only time this song gets interesting is when you do something different with it. Because the original “twelve days” song tends to drone on and on in seemingly endless (and almost certainly false) merriment. When Eric and I were younger, we sang in a kids group here in Austin – we used to sing in malls and churches and at special events around the city. One year, we had the opportunity to record a television Christmas special for one of the local channels. We spent the entire day in a studio under hot lights, singing various selections from our repertoire, sometimes repeating them three or four times to get the “perfect” take. And one of our songs that year was The Twelve Days of Christmas. But not the original version – we did the twelve days of TEXAS Christmas. I can’t remember the whole list (Eric – do you remember it??) but it included tornadoes, bucking broncos, armadillos and “fiiiiiive oiiiiil weeeells!” And it ended with a possum in a pine tree. We were divided into little groups, and each group was assigned one of the days, along with some sort of pantomime to illustrate what we were singing about. I think I was part of the “tornadoes” group, where we held our arms up and spun them around to simulate tornado movement. And Eric, if I’m not mistaken, was the possum in the pine tree. There were two kids on either side of him who held their arms over his head like tree branches, and Eric did his best possum imitation. That was funny. It was really funny. Yeah… good times…

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be receiving something other than poultry and sixteenth-century villagers for Christmas. But if I don’t, I just have to remember – it’s better to give than to receive.

By the way – you guys all like chicken, right?