Well did you have a good Christmas? Or perhaps you feel you are still celebrating it? Is Christmas a distant memory, overtaken by New Year and just getting on with life, even a newly imposed diet, or are you still keeping the festival of Christ’s birth? There seems to be a trend to regard Christmas Day as the only day of Christmas and from Boxing Day, properly called the Feast of Stephen, we talk about it in the past tense. As we all know from the song, there are really twelve days of Christmas and today is day 11. So we are still celebrating; the tree is still up and twinkling.

If you know your song well, you will know that this is the day you can expect 11 pipers piping to turn up. I looked this up on the internet the other day and discovered that MSN Money has calculated that the cheap version, just sending the present for the day, would cost £106,192.05. The lavish version, sending the repeat gifts as well on each day, clocks up a credit card bill of £339,826.85. That might be a little out of reach for most of us. The most expensive item at £100,000 was the 10 Lords a-leaping, calculated according to their fees for TV work. The pipers, today’s item, came in at £1,292.50 including VAT.

An odd song, to say the least. Its origins are a little murky, but some have claimed that it seems to have been used by Roman Catholics in England as a catechism, a fun way to remind people of important tenets of faith, at a time when to be a Roman Catholic was likely to lead to death. The English Reformation was blood soaked and Roman Catholicism was feared for centuries after the reign of Mary Tudor. Some pretty horrible things were perpetrated on all sides and it took centuries for things to loosen sufficiently for freedom to worship to be granted. So, the true meaning of the song is hidden and we need some help to unlock its code.

Let’s start with ‘my true love’. That’s quite easy. We are to ‘love the Lord our God with all our heart’ (Mark 12:28ff). Our true love is God and the presents are gifts from God.

The first gift is the most important; it is Christ in the guise of a partridge. A mother partridge protects her young by pretending to be injured and so acts as a decoy. She draws the force of the attacker and there are allusions there to Christ taking the sting of death and sin upon himself to protect us, his young. The pear tree is a fruit tree and so takes us to the garden of paradise regained. As a tree it carries references to the cross, the tree of shame that has become the tree of glory. It is a rich image to play around with. So our true love, God, gives us the partridge in a pear tree, Christ who redeems us and brings paradise restored.

Day 2 brings 2 turtle-doves. These stand for the Old and New Testaments, the two collections of scripture that open up to us insights on salvation; the witnesses to God’s gracious activity through generations. Two turtle-doves are the poor persons offering for a first born child in the Old Testament and, according to Luke (2:22-38), this is what Mary and Joseph took to the temple, an event we commemorate at Candlemas on 2nd February. Candlemas shows the Old Testament being fulfilled in the New Testament.

Things start to get a bit more complicated, or even obtuse, from now on. Day 3 brings us the French hens. These take us to St Paul’s great hymn to love, much used at weddings. It ends with the virtues of faith, hope and love or charity. The greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13).

Day 4 brings 4 calling birds and these are the four evangelists - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - and their gospels which sing the story of salvation.

We can pause for a moment at 5 gold rings. These are the first 5 books of the bible, the Pentateuch. These are the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Tradition has it that they were written by Moses, but since they also report his death this is unlikely, leaving aside the textual evidence of different authors, styles and editors over hundreds of years. They contain ancient stories and sagas, rich in imagery and capturing the imagination from creation to Noah and his rainbow, Joseph’s multicoloured coat to laws and moral codes that have surprises and great compassion alongside aspects that sound barbaric to modern ears. They are a treasury of wisdom and the profound if we take the trouble to wrestle with them like Jacob wrestling with the stranger in the night, who turns out to be God. The decline of Sunday Schools means that children and many adults do not know these stories and we are the poorer for it.

OK, recovered? Off we go again. Day 6 and we have geese laying eggs. Eggs produce life and six bringers of life take us to the six days of creation in Genesis. God is the source of life. On Tuesday we went to ‘The Deep’ in Hull, a sea life centre. In there they have a timeline where 1.5cm (5/8th inch in old money) stands for a million years and we can walk through evolution. It starts with the big bang and our minds are taken through the awe inspiring wonder of creation and life that has resulted in us.

So far we have seen nothing particularly Roman Catholic about these gifts. It is day 7 that gives the game away. The 7 swans are the 7 sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church. These are baptism, confirmation, Communion, marriage, confession, ordination and anointing with oil. The Church of England since the Reformation has held to just two of these as Sacraments of the gospel - baptism and Communion. The others are relegated to a lesser position in the 39 Articles. They are allowed or at least not specifically forbidden, but don’t belong on a par with baptism and the Eucharist.

Day 8 gives us 8 milk maids and these are code for the 8 beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel, which begin ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit...’ (5:1-12). They are a sermon on their own, as the others could easily be too.

The 9 ladies dancing are the 9 fruits of the Spirit in Galatians (5:22-23): ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control’. They take us to the character of Christian living, not just its actions.

Day 10, with the expensive Lords leaping, takes us to what Lord’s do - make laws. These stand for the 10 Commandments and moral foundations.

Today’s pipers piping stand for the 11 disciples who remained faithful to Jesus. We have the place of constancy in faith and also of apostasy. The original may have been a warning against faltering in the face of persecution, but when we look at these ‘faithful’ disciples, we can remember how many ran away from the cross and were brought back through God’s forgiveness and love.

We end on day 12 with the drums. Drums keep us in step, in time, provide rhythm. These are the 12 points of the Apostles Creed and we can use that rhythmic image as an imaginative way to regard creeds and formal statements of faith. They are to be a heart beat for the dance of faith and not a straightjacket restricting all movement and engagement with the world around us.

So, ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ is an imaginative song, possibly born of oppression and struggle, to remind us of important tenets of faith. God is the lover who gives out of grace and all of the presents are to inspire our living in that grace, in that faith and hope and love, remembering that the greatest of these is love, the love of God in Christ.

© Ian Black 2004

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