The Twelve Days of Christmas

1. On the twelfth day of Christmas my true-love sent to me
Twelve bells a ringing,
Eleven bulls a beating,
Ten asses racing
Nine ladies dancing,
Eight boys a-singing,
Seven swans a-swimming,
Six geese a-laying,
Five goldie rings,
Four colley birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtledoves
And the part of the mistletoe bough.

12. On the first day of Christmas my true-love sent to me
One goldie ring,
And the part of a June apple tree.

Note from Sharp:

This song consists of twenty-three verses, and is sung in the following way. The second verse begins:

On the eleventh day of Christmas
my true Love sent to me
Eleven bulls a-beating, etc.,

and so on till the twelfth verse, as given in the text. The process is then reversed, the verses being gradually increased in length, so that the thirteenth verse is:

On the second day of Christmas
my true Love gave to me
Two turtle doves
One goldie ring,
And the part of a June apple-tree.

In this way the twenty-third verse is triumphantly reached, and that, except for the last line, is the same is the first verse.

Another way to sing the song is to being with "On the first day of Christmas," etc., and to continue to the "twelfth day," when the song concludes.

"June Apple-Tree" may or may not be a corruption of "Juniper-Tree," but the singer explained it by saying that it meant a tree whose fruit kept sound and good till the following June.

For the third gift, the singer sang "Three Britten Chains," which she said were "sea-birds with golden chains round their necks." All the other singers I have heard sang "Three French Hens," and, as this is the usual reading in printed copies, I have so given it in the text. "Britten Chains" may be a corruption of "Breton hens."

The "twelve days are, of course, those between Christmas Day and Epiphany, or Twelfth Day.

For other versions, see Mr. Baring-Gould's note to "The jolly Goss-hawk (Songs of the West,  No. 71); Chambers's Popular Songs of Scotland (p. 42); Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes (pp. 63 and 73); and Northumbrian Minstrelsy (p. 129), where the song is described as "one of the quaintest of Christmas carols now relegated to the nursery as a forfeit game, where each child in succession has to repeat the gifts of the day and incurs a forfeit for every error." In this last version (also given in Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes, p. 73, and Husk's Songs of the Nativity), the first gift is "A partridge on a pear tree," and this I have heard several times in country villages. One singer who gave it to me volunteered the statement that it was only another way of singing "part of a Juniper-tree," of which, of course, it may be a corruption.

These words are also used as a Children's Game. One of Halliwell's versions (p. 63) is still used by children in Somerset, and Lady Gomme (Dictionary of British Folk-Lore, volume i, p. 315), besides reprinting three of the forms given above, gives a London variant. In a note to the game, Lady Gomme points out that the festival of the twelve days, the great midwinter feast of Yule, was a very important one, and that in this game may, perhaps, be discerned the relic of certain customs and ceremonies and the penalties or forfeits incurred by those who omitted religiously to carry them out; and she adds that it was a very general practice to work of all kinds to be put entirely aside before Christmas and not resumed until after Twelfth Day.

Country singers are very fond of accumulative songs of this type, regarding them as tests of endurance and memory, and sometimes of sobriety!