Happy Christmas and Happy New Year!

An English Christmas song to wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Winter Holidays!

  

Besides the interpretation by the Muppets, the song is just as it sounds, featuring a "true love" presenting his/ her beloved one with an increasing number of weird gifts: a partridge, two turtle doves, three French hens, four calling birds, five golden rings, six geese a-laying, seven swans a-swimming, eight maids a-milking, nine ladies dancing, ten lords a-leaping, eleven pipers piping, twelve drummers drumming (the lyrics is here).

I guess these gifts are not your favourites and the whole text may appear surreal, so let's try to make sense of this 250-years-old song and see its connection with Christmas.

A religious interpretation of the symbolical meaning of the gifts can be read in The Voice, a website collecting biblical and theological resources. The article gives a general account on the "twelve days" of Christmas, from the 25th of December to the 5th of January. The cycle closes with the 6th of January, which in many cultures (in Italy, for example) is the day in which gifts are given, especially to the chidren. Then it analyses the twelve figures: the partridge is an image of Jesus Christ, the two turtle doves stand for the Old and the New Testament, etc.

An article on the tradition of Christmas carols (carol= choral song), questioning the previous interpretation, is on the BBC website, which finds the origin of the song in a game played on the Twelfth Night. In this case, the partridge would be the symbol of the devil! An example of "the way in which a popular song can be reworked as a hymn or carol".

Christmas is a celebration of new life. It falls in the days immediately after the winter solstice - in our hemisphere 21st December, with the shortest day and longest night - daytime becoming longer and longer from that date on. It is interesting to know more about other winter festivities with the same character - celebrating the light and new life, feasting, giving gifts, having fun  - held in the same period in other places and times on this page of the BBC.