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# The Twelve Days of Christmas Was a Game
- URL: https://www.ornatepapers.co.uk/the-twelve-days-of-christmas-was-a-game/
- Published: 2026-09-28T09:06:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-28T09:07:50.000Z
- Author: Kate

The Twelve Days of Christmas is the song where a true love sends a gift a day. A partridge in a pear tree on the first day, two turtle doves on the second, and so on up to twelve drummers drumming, and every verse repeats all the gifts that came before it. Most people can get as far as five gold rings and then start to guess.

Around 1810 a printer in London put out a small picture book of the song, one page for each gift. In the old versions the lords a-leaping were the last gift, the twelfth, so the book ends with them. And in this book they are not leaping. They are pole-vaulting down a hill.

I mention the lords because they are the first sign that The Twelve Days was never really a song.

It was a game. The words were first printed in about 1780, in a children's book called *Mirth Without Mischief*. When the collector James Halliwell printed the rhyme again in 1842, he explained what it was for. It was a memory game, played by the fire. Everyone sits in a circle. The first person says the first day. The next person says the second day and then repeats the first. Round it goes, one gift longer each turn, until somebody gets the order wrong or leaves a day out. Then they pay a forfeit, which is a small penalty for losing. Usually a kiss, or a sweet. In Newcastle in the 1840s the forfeits were collected up through the evening and sold back to their owners at the end, in return for some new dare. The rhyme was not there to be sung. The point was to get it wrong.

![Four people in Regency dress sit in a ring around a fire, drawn in flat colour with dark outlines. A young woman drops a silver thimble into a basket on an older woman's lap. The basket already holds a gold ring, a white glove and a red ribbon.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5a/6e/5a6e2f64-e4d0-444f-b140-365f4cdb47c5/content/images/2026/09/Partridge-Pear-2.jpg)

I should say here that I sell a wrapping paper with the partridge on it. That paper is what sent me looking. I wanted to put the first line of the carol on the listing and realised I did not know what the first line meant.

So, the pear tree.

A partridge is a ground bird. It nests on the ground, feeds on the ground and when it is startled it runs before it flies. You will find one under a pear tree long before you find one in it. This bothered somebody in 1867, a writer who did not give his name, and he suggested that "pear tree" was what English ears had made of the French word perdrix, which means partridge. If he is right, the line was originally "a partridge, une perdrix". The same bird, said twice, once in each language. In 1916 the folk-song collector Anne Gilchrist looked at the French versions of the song and found the partridge in all of them, which is the best support the idea has ever had. It is still only an idea. I like it very much and nobody can prove it.

The other gifts have changed just as much over the years. Old versions had bears a-baiting, bulls a-roaring, hares a-running, badgers and ships a-sailing. In one, the gifts came not from "my true love" but from "my mother". The fourth gift, four calling birds, was once four colly birds. Colly is an old Somerset word for coal-black, so they were blackbirds. They stayed colly until 1909, when a composer called Frederic Austin published the arrangement everyone now sings. He changed colly to calling because nobody knew what colly meant. He put "On" at the start of every verse. He moved the last four gifts around, which is how the drummers, once the ninth gift, ended up twelfth and last. And he wrote the long, slow tune for the fifth gift, "Five gold rings", the line every family sings louder than the rest and holds for a beat too long. He said the tune was one his family had always sung and that he had never heard it anywhere else. So the version we think of as ancient is only about a hundred years old, and its most famous moment was written by one man.

You may also have read that the song is a secret Catholic code, with the two turtle doves standing for the Old and New Testaments and so on. That idea was put forward in 1979 by a writer who gave no evidence for it, and it has been repeated every Christmas since. None of the gifts would have got anyone into trouble. There is no code.

We never sang it at home. I picked it up the way you pick up a song you keep hearing in shops, which is to say the first four days and then a guess. That is probably why the first line stopped me at all. A song you have always known does not get looked at twice.

So I knew the line was wrong before I chose this paper, and I chose it anyway. On it the partridge sits up in the branches, where everyone expects to find it, next to pears it would never go near in real life. A pattern has no room for a footnote, and nobody wrapping a present wants one. Besides, two hundred years of people getting the words wrong by the fire have made the wrong version the true one. If the pear tree was a mistake, it is the kind you pay for with a kiss. Those were always the rules.

![A parcel tied with an orange ribbon, beside a sheet of wrapping paper printed with partridges among pears and white blossom, on a deep red ground.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5a/6e/5a6e2f64-e4d0-444f-b140-365f4cdb47c5/content/images/2026/09/il_fullxfull.8548510165_iavj.webp)

The partridge is in the shop, on the deep red, as sheets and as a roll.[Have a look.](https://ornatepapers.etsy.com/uk/listing/1546425520/partridge-in-a-pear-tree-wrapping-paper?ref=ornatepapers.co.uk)