The 7th Day of Christmas my true love gave to me seven swans a-swimming “The Seven Swans a Swimming verse represents the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (Romans 12:6-8). Prophesy, service, teaching, encouraging, giving, leadership & mercy. Children were taught that when you walk with God the gifts of the Spirit moved in your life as easily as a swan on the water.” SOURCE: GOOGLED ONLINE. HERE'S ANOTHER: By Professor Kate Williams Seven swans a swimming – well, with giving this, our ‘true love’ was really buying us something rather expensive. Swans have always been luxury goods, a medieval Gucci handbag, if you will. In the medieval period, swans were status symbols, exchanged between noblemen as the centuries wore on, they became increasingly exclusive to royalty. Any top feast worth its salt had to have a swan as a centrepiece, especially at Christmas feasts. Ideally, you’d roast a few swans in their feathers and put a burning piece of incense in its beak. In 1251, Henry III or...

Monday, 30 December 2024 is the Sixth Day of Christmas, and this early, dark predawn when I might have been blogging or still sleeping, I spent an hour fiddling with my "few appropriate remarks" for next Sunday. Priests don't just stand up and start spouting off, and at this age in life it takes me more Time than ever to assemble something to say that I won't be embarrassed about as I step down from the pulpit. One of the things I'm learning in this advancing AI chapter of the Electronic Age is that Artificial Intelligence is a "Christian." I've been doing Bible study so many years that I'm automatically alert to hints, prejudices, bias, in whatever I read. Just so, this morning when I Googled something about Moses, here's what came up: “ AI Overview In the Bible, Moses prophesied about Jesus in Deuteronomy 18:15, which states, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites. You must lis...

  The fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me five gold rings. But everything isn't necessarily as it seems. AI Overview In the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas", the five gold rings given on the fifth day of Christmas represent the first five books of the Old Testament, also known as the Pentateuch or the Torah:  Genesis: The book of origins and the beginning of life Exodus: The book of redemption Leviticus: The book of worship and communion Numbers: The experiences of a pilgrim people However, some say that the five gold rings may actually refer to the common ring-necked pheasant, a golden-brown bird with a white ring around its neck. This would make the first seven gifts of the song all about birds, since the other gifts are also birds. The shift from birds to gold rings and then back to birds again in the song makes it easy to interpret the gold rings as something else. You may make it whatever you wish. "On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave t...

Here's what AI says about it: AI Overview The fourth day of Christmas is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, also known as Childermas, and takes place on  December 28th .  It's a day to remember the children who were killed in Bethlehem by King Herod when he was trying to kill baby Jesus.   The four calling birds on the fourth day of the song "The 12 Days of Christmas" are said to represent the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  These Gospels spread the good news of Jesus' life and teachings.   Something I read, and linked here yesterday, said the original song was four colly birds and that colly meant black, so called referring to the coal of the coal mining district in Britain. What kind of birds would they be? Crows? Four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie? Starlings, grackles, ravens?  Down in the lower part of our backyard on Conodoguinet Creek in Harrisburg, I once watched from our kitchen window as four large black birds, I think they wer...