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"The Twelve Days of Christmas" is an English Christmas carol. A classic example of a cumulative song, the lyrics detail a series of increasingly numerous gifts given to the speaker by their "true love" on each of the twelve days of Christmas (the twelve days that make up the Christmas season, starting with Christmas Day).
The lyrics of the song are, in many places, exceedingly obscure, and present an unusual mixture of Christian catechesis, astronomical mnemonics, and what may be pagan cosmology. The musicologist Cecil Sharp , influential in the folklore revival in England, noted in his 1916 One Hundred English Folksongs that the words are "so corrupt, indeed ...
Where do the '12 Days of Christmas' lyrics come from? The lyrics to this song first appeared in the 1780 English children's book Mirth Without Mischief. Some of the words have changed over the years.
The song reached No. 1 in Germany, Canada, Switzerland and the Netherlands. "Words" was the Bee Gees third UK top 10 hit, reaching number 8 on the UK Singles Chart, and in a UK television special on ITV in December 2011 it was voted fourth in "The Nation's Favourite Bee Gees Song". [1]
In the UK the rhyme was first recorded in Songs for the Nursery, published in London in 1805. This version differed beyond the number twelve, with the lyrics: Thirteen, fourteen, draw the curtain, Fifteen sixteen, the maid's in the kitchen, Seventeen, eighteen, she's in waiting, Nineteen, twenty, my stomach's empty. [1]
The song's origins are uncertain; however, its nearest known relative is the English folk song "The Twelve Apostles." [2] Both songs are listed in the Roud Folk Song Index as #133. Parallel features in the two songs' cumulative structure and lyrics (cumulating to 12 loosely biblical references) make this connection apparent.
The phrase “for auld lang syne” essentially means “for (the sake of) old times”, which positions it as an apt song to sing at a time when people reflect on the past 12 months.
Lyrics are words that make up a song, usually consisting of verses and choruses. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist . The words to an extended musical composition such as an opera are, however, usually known as a " libretto " and their writer, as a " librettist ".