The Baritone’s Family Song
1909, England. A thirty-seven-year-old operatic baritone better known for singing and arranging the music of others than his own sends a song that his family sings to the music publisher Novello & Co. He has put the song together from memory, and he has added something new to it as well. This version would standardize the tune as it is commonly known today, and it would permanently alter the text, which had been in print since at least 1780.
A Game
The Twelve Days of Christmas traditionally spans from Christmas Day to January 5th (Twelfth Night), which is also Epiphany Eve. Twelfth Night marked the end of the Christmastide feasts and celebrations, and in previous centuries it was customary to play a memory game with forfeits called “The Twelve Days.” The party would gather around and the leader would start the game by saying the item for the first day. This first day item had to be repeated by the other players. The first day item would then be repeated with a second day item added, and the game continued until the items for all twelve days were said by each player. If a player forgot an item and made a mistake, they had to pay a “forfeit” to the group such as handing over a piece of confectionery or performing a spontaneous dance.
No Fixed Text
The first known printing of the lyrics for “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is from Mirth Without Mischief, a children’s book published in London around 1780. The words for this game were likely fluid before 1780, and different variations continued to appear throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1892 a version appeared in the posthumous memoir of Scottish artist and poet William Bell Scott, recalled from his Edinburgh childhood. In it the first gift is not a partridge but “a very pretty peacock upon a pear tree.” An early American version of the song was published in The Journal of American Folklore in 1900. The journal credited a text from about 1800, and this version included several different variations from the more common lyrics we know today:
Seven squabs a-swimming, instead of swans
Eight hounds a-running, instead of eight maids a-milking
Nine bears a-beating, instead of nine ladies dancing
Ten cocks a-crowing, instead of ten lords a-leaping
Eleven lords a-leaping, instead of pipers piping
Twelve ladies a-dancing, instead of drummers drumming
Notice how the lords and ladies did not disappear from this version, they simply changed places.
A Secret Code
In the late twentieth century Hugh D. McKellar, a Canadian teacher and hymnologist, proposed that “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was used as a secret code or catechism by English Catholics who were persecuted from the mid-sixteenth century through the early nineteenth century. McKellar argued that the various gifts of the song represented important symbols of faith which could be sung and remembered in public without suspicion. The partridge, which feigns injury to lure predators away from their nest, stood for Christ and his sacrifice. The four calling birds represented either the writers of the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), or the four major prophets of the Old Testament (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel). The ten lords represented the Ten Commandments. McKellar’s theory has been widely debunked, as there is a lack of primary sources from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries linking “The Twelve Days of Christmas” to secret Catholic instruction.
The Novello Setting
When the operatic baritone, composer, and arranger Frederic Austin published his arrangement of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in 1909, he helped codify both the text and the melody while making changes that stuck. Previous versions of the lyrics typically began their verses with “The first day of Christmas,” or “The twelfth day of Christmas.” Austin added the preposition “On” as in “On the first day of Christmas” to the beginning of each verse. Austin also changed the gift of the fourth day from the more common “colly birds” to “calling birds.” Colly is an old dialect word for coal-black. “Colly birds” meant blackbirds, but colly was less well known by the time of Austin’s arrangement. Although the song lyrics are much more unified now, I still see slight variations. Some recent arrangements have “five gold rings” and others “five golden rings.”
The most important musical change Austin made was the drawn-out motif of the “five gold rings,” which is now standard. Before 1909, the melody for “five gold rings” was likely sung in many different ways with some earlier tunes giving the fifth gift no special treatment. Austin interrupts the flow of the music by adding a dramatic two-bar musical prolongation with an allargando (to gradually broaden or slow), and he adds an extra flourish of notes for the last verse with a molto allargando (broadening or slowing even more). Singers have been stretching the last note of “rings” ever since. Austin included a note with his 1909 arrangement, a rare personal word on where the song came from:
Note:- This song was, in my childhood, current in my family. I have not met with the tune of it elsewhere, nor with the particular version of the words, and have, in this setting, recorded both to the best of my recollection. F.A.
Christmas Price Index
In 1984, Provident National Bank in Philadelphia (the predecessor of PNC Bank) launched the Christmas Price Index, a lighthearted parallel to the government Consumer Price Index. Each year, the bank prices all of the gifts from “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for its own version of the CPI. In 2025, the total cost for the twelve-gift basket was $51,476.12, which was a 4.5% increase over 2024, and, by PNC’s count, a 157% overall increase since the original index in 1984. The “five gold rings” increased the most year-over-year with a 32.5% jump. The full 364-gift “True Cost of Christmas” (buying all of the gifts with the verses repeated) would be $218,542.98, a 4.4% year-over-year increase.
What One Man Remembered
William Bell Scott remembered a peacock. Frederic Austin remembered a partridge, and a tune he never heard anywhere else. Scott’s memory went into a memoir. Austin’s went to Novello. Now it is our memory as well.
Sources and Further Reading
The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Vol. 2), Collected and Annotated by Alice Bertha Gomme. A collection of tunes, rhymes, and games published in 1898.
The Twelve Days of Christmas, The Hymn: A Journal of Congregational Song, 45(4), October 1994, by Hugh D. McKellar. Controversial article claiming “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was a secret Catholic catechism.
The New Oxford Book of Carols edited by Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott. An expansive collection of Christmas carols with notes on historical background and performance.
Listen Along - Recommended Playlist
Listen to multiple versions of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” including Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters, John Denver and the Muppets, and the recently popular arrangement from Straight No Chaser. Later versions follow, including the Philadelphia Brass Ensemble, Pentatonix, and the Glenn Miller Orchestra.
Below the line, for Evergreens: the image of Austin’s personal note on his 1909 score, and the cover page of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” from the 1780 children’s book Mirth Without Mischief