the Seventh Day of Christmas
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 ordered 125 swans for the Christmas feast for his court. Dining with the King in winter meant eating swan.
Swans were so important to aristocratic and royal status that they had to be marked, usually on the soft skin of the beak. Notches would usually be cut in, but there could also be initials or even heraldic devices. These ‘swan marks’ became the property of the government; they had to be bought at great expense and, following the law that only wealthy landowners could own swans, their use was restricted. Essentially, from the late fifteenth century, only the Crown, the very rich and some wealthy institutions such as guilds, universities and cathedrals were lucky enough to have their own flock of swans. Any spare swans wandering around were automatically seen as the Crown’s – and picked up by Swan Collectors. Swanmoots were special courts to discuss ownership of swans. As you see, Swans were terribly sought after and often stolen.
In Horace Walpole’s astonishing collection of books at Strawberry Hill, were two books of ‘Swan Marks’, on vellum, probably dating from the sixteenth century. Still, now, we have the annual Swan Upping ceremony on the Thames in early July, when the ‘Swan Uppers’ of the Queen and two guilds, Vintners and Dyers, travel the Thames to count the swans.
Swans looked fabulous and denoted wealth and power, particularly on private estates. Whether the swan was worth eating was another question. One rather disgruntled commentator in 1738 complained that goose was much better – swan was ‘blacker, harder, and tougher’ and was hard on the digestion as well as having ‘melancholic juice’…but ‘for its Rarity serves as a Dish to adorn great Men’s tables at Feasts and Entertainments, being else no desirable Dainty’. Indeed, full grown Swan was deemed so unappealing that baby cygnets were taken and bred separately in a fenced pen, fed on barley, purely so they’d be tastier to eat. When Christmas was restored after Charles II came to the throne, people’s minds turned to Christmas and the earliest Christmas menu – a huge feast of meat – lists a ‘swan pie’ along with ‘powdered goose’ and ‘six eels, three larded’.
The Empress Josephine created a grand garden at her estate at Napoleon, a tribute to him, a claim of the glories of Napoleon, who was vaunted as taking anything from anywhere. She had a menagerie of foreign animals, including emus, kangaroos and an orangutan who ate carrots at the table with her guests. But her prize was her black swans, brought over from an expedition to map the coast of Australia from 1800-1803 – a prelude to empire. Over 200,00 specimens of plants were taken to the Museum of Natural History and Josephine got the animals, packed up in pairs and fed on water and bits of fruit on the way, including her beloved pair of black swans. Some of the animals died, but the swans settled in their pond on the outskirts of Paris. Josephine adored the swans and saw them as her symbol even on chairs!
de Malmaison. Artist François-Honoré-Georges Jacob-Desmalter, Photograph by Jebulon. Image from Wikimedia Commons.]
The ‘Swan Song’ phrase comes from the notion, dating back to Aristotle and Socrates, that the swan sings better when it is nearing death. The Victorians were still eating swan, but it gradually fell out of fashion and now, of course, swans are protected. Until as late as 1998, killing a swan (that was not marked as your own) was still an act of treason. Now, it is simply illegal because they are protected. So, unfortunately, when your true love gives you seven swans, you probably should give them back. Along with everything else – the milkmaids, the dancing ladies and all of rest of it, as humans as gifts doesn’t really cut it anymore. But I think you can keep the geese.
[1] See Janet Kear, Man and Wildfowl (London, 1990)
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Here's another, from VOX online, that appeals to my skeptic and cynical nature:
https://www.vox.com/21796404/12-days-of-christmas-explained
"CULTURE
The 12 Days of Christmas: The story behind the holiday’s most annoying carol
A few things you may not know about the song — and the actual 12 days of Christmas.
by Tanya Pai
Updated Dec 1, 2022 at 10:05 AM CST
Tanya Pai heads the standards team at Vox, focusing on copy editing, fact-checking, inclusive language and sourcing, and newsroom standards and ethics issues. She’s also a founder of Language, Please, a free resource for journalists and storytellers focused on thoughtful language use.
It might seem unbelievable given that the “Christmas creep” now begins before Halloween, but the true Christmas season actually starts on Christmas Day itself. That’s right: December 25 marks the official start of the 12 days of Christmas, the Christian tradition that shares its name with a relentlessly stick-in-your-head Christmas carol.
Here are a few things you may not know about the song and the season.
What are the 12 days of Christmas?
The 12 days of Christmas is the period in Christian theology that marks the span between the birth of Christ and the coming of the Magi, the three wise men. It begins on December 25 (Christmas) and runs through January 6 (the Epiphany, sometimes also called Three Kings’ Day). The four weeks preceding Christmas are collectively known as Advent, which begins four Sundays before Christmas and ends on December 24.
Some families choose to mark the 12-day period by observing the feast days of various saints (including St. Stephen on December 26) and planning daily Christmas-related activities, but for many, things go back to business as usual after December 25.
“The 12 Days of Christmas” is also a Christmas carol in which the singer brags about all the cool gifts they received from their “true love” during the 12 days of Christmas. Each verse builds on the previous one, serving as a really effective way to annoy family members on road trips.
The lyrics to “The 12 Days of Christmas” have changed over the years
The version most people are familiar with today begins with this verse:
On the first day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
a partridge in a pear tree.
The song then adds a gift for each day, building on the verse before it, until you’re reciting all 12 gifts together:
Day 2: two turtle doves
Day 3: three French hens
Day 4: four calling birds
Day 5: five gold rings
Day 6: six geese a-laying
Day 7: seven swans a-swimming
Day 8: eight maids a-milking
Day 9: nine ladies dancing
Day 10: 10 lords a-leaping
Day 11: 11 pipers piping
Day 12: 12 drummers drumming
The history of the carol is somewhat murky. The earliest known version first appeared in a 1780 children’s book called Mirth With-out Mischief. (A first edition of that book sold for $23,750 at a Sotheby’s auction in 2014, but you can also buy a digital copy on Amazon.) Some historians think the song could be French in origin, but most agree it was designed as a “memory and forfeits” game, in which singers tested their recall of the lyrics and had to award their opponents a “forfeit” — a kiss or a favor of some kind — if they made a mistake.
Many variations of the lyrics have existed at different points. Some mention “bears a-baiting” or “ships a-sailing”; some name the singer’s mother as the gift giver instead of their true love. Early versions list four “colly” birds, an archaic term meaning black as coal (blackbirds, in other words). And some people theorize that the five gold rings actually refer to the markings of a ring-necked pheasant, which would align with the bird motif of the early verses.
In any case, the song most of us are familiar with today comes from an English composer named Frederic Austin; in 1909, he set the melody and lyrics (including changing “colly” to “calling”) and added as his own flourish, the drawn-out cadence of “five go-old rings.”
The song is not a coded primer on Christianity
A popular theory that’s made the internet rounds is that the lyrics to “The 12 Days of Christmas” are coded references to Christianity; it posits that the song was written to help Christians learn and pass on the tenets of their faith while avoiding persecution. Under that theory, the various gifts break down as follows, as the myth-debunking website Snopes explained:
2 Turtle Doves = The Old and New Testaments
3 French Hens = Faith, Hope and Charity, the Theological Virtues
4 Calling Birds = the Four Gospels and/or the Four Evangelists
5 Golden Rings = The first Five Books of the Old Testament, the “Pentateuch,” which gives the history of man’s fall from grace
6 Geese A-laying = the six days of creation
7 Swans A-swimming = the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven sacraments
8 Maids A-milking = the eight beatitudes
9 Ladies Dancing = the nine Fruits of the Holy Spirit
10 Lords A-leaping = the Ten Commandments
11 Pipers Piping = the 11 faithful apostles
12 Drummers Drumming = the 12 points of doctrine in the Apostle’s Creed
The partridge in the pear tree, naturally, represents Jesus Christ.
This theory seems tailor-made for circulation via chain emails, but it actually makes little sense once you examine it. Snopes has a great explanation of the many, many holes in its logic. The most egregious: First, the song’s gifts have nothing to do with their Christian “equivalents,” so the song is basically useless as a way to remember key pillars of the faith. And second, if Christians were so restricted from practicing their faith that they had to conceal messages in a song, they also wouldn’t be able to celebrate Christmas in the first place — much less sing Christmas carols.
The late historian William Studwell, known for his Christmas carol expertise, also refuted the coded message idea. As he told the Religion News Service in 2008:
This was not originally a Catholic song, no matter what you hear on the Internet. … Neutral reference books say this is nonsense. If there was such a catechism device, a secret code, it was derived from the original secular song. It’s a derivative, not the source.\
Sorry to spoil your dinner party fun fact; while I’m at it, I might as well tell you “Ring Around the Rosie” isn’t about the Black Plague, either.
No matter the cost, though, actually giving someone all this stuff is probably not a great idea; just think of all the bird poo.
Are there any other versions of “The 12 Days of Christmas”?
The structure of “The 12 Days of Christmas” lends itself easily to parodies, of which there have been many. There’s Jeff Foxworthy’s redneck version, Twisted Sister’s heavy metal take, and, of course, a Muppets version (featuring John Denver).
Others have attempted to interpret the 12 Days of Christmas via food, with dishes like deviled eggs representing geese a-laying and so on."
sans permission
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It is clear that, in the song "Twelve Days of Christmas," symbolism of the gifts does not have a correct, objective answer. What the gifts represent varies. Spiritualization of the gifts is an interpretation of the Christian religious community. Digging into it bottoms out at a playful repetitive song that's a game that testa the players/singers' memorization, and, as one wrote, penalties or rewards of exchanging a kiss for each mistake!
Anyway, whatever!
RSF&PTL
T89&c