The Twelve Re:Tweets of Christmas

‘Tis the third day of Christmas and we should be due three French hens, to go with the two turtle doves and a partridge thus far accumulated.  But our friends at Radio 4 Tweet of the Day have decided to offer us an alternative shopping list to pass our true loves’ way.  Forget gold rings in these austere times, but greater riches are at hand:  a different bird species for each day from Christmas Day till Epiphany.  And what’s more, they’re all wild birds, none of your domestic fowl.  So out go the three French hens and in come three moorhens.  Click on the button for Radio 4's seasonal selection.

12 Tweets

The origins and meaning of the Twelve Days carol have been debated for centuries.  All sorts of symbolism has been suggested, and today’s lyrics undoubtedly include a few mistranslations and Chinese whispers.  Tomorrow, will you be getting four calling birds, or Radio 4’s suggested offering of four New Zealand Robins?  Or are you of the view that on the fourth day of Christmas only two brace of rooks will do?

Four colley birds this morning, West Yorkshire (Laurence Rose)

For surely those four colley birds – black as coal – were the same black birds as the four-and-twenty baked in another rhyme’s pie.  In other words, rooks.  In this typically Telegraphesque article you can read about how quintessentially English is the bird, how reassuring its return to the rookery in February, how dignified its bearing and how much fun it is to shoot and bake in a pie.

As for yesterday’s two turtle doves, why were they not in Africa? The most obvious explanation for this minor ornithological howler is that if you have a crotchet, two quavers and another crotchet to worry about “two squabs” doesn’t really work.  But why doves at all when the second day of Christmas has its own bird already?

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Wren ©Andreas Trepte/www.photo-natur.de

My version of the carol would have to depart from that of 1780 as early as day two, St. Stephen’s Day.  Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr was said to have been betrayed by a loudly singing wren while hiding from his enemies.  Boxing Day was for centuries commemorated by Hunting the Wren, when boys set off to catch the bird and parade it around town, as described in the traditional "Wren Song". The Wren, the Wren, the king of all birds, St. Stephen's day was caught in the furze. Although he is little, his family's great, I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat. This almost certainly springs from a pre-Christian tradition, when wren feathers were given out before a voyage, to ward off disaster at sea.  In the Isle of Man Hunting the Wren persisted in some form into the 1930s, while in parts of France it continues today.

But perhaps the turtle dove should remain in the song for, whatever it may have symbolised in the past, it is now a symbol of something unattainable.  These days you’re hardly more likely to see this once common bird during the months it should be with us – April to August – than at Christmas.

It has been argued that the five gold rings once referred to pheasants, who bear a ring of white, not gold, feathers round their necks.  But the oldest known published version of 1780 illustrates the lyric with five rings and no pheasants.  The new BBC list goes for goldfinches at this point, and why not? From then on Radio 4 favours ornithological interest over any regard for a composer trying to set the lyrics: 

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Six white-fronted geese a-laying
Seven mute swans a-swimming
Eight nightjars a-milking....

Come again?  Of course!  The old superstition that the night-flying, wide-gaped nightjar stole our goats’ milk from the very udder.  Clever.

Nine Andean cock-of-the-rock a-dancing
Ten manakin a-leaping
Eleven sandpipers piping....

Which just leaves my favourite – and I’ll explain why in a special Twelfth Night Re:Tweet – Twelve snipe a-drumming.