It took me a couple of tries, but I finished my version of The Twelve Days of Christmas just a few days before the start of the Twelve Days of Christmas, a period that begins on Christmas Day and ends on January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany, marking the arrival of the magi to the nativity scene.
I looked up the history of this song, and as is typical of much of the information we find online, original sources are missing, so at the risk of repeating… The song goes back to a 1780 English children’s book, Mirth Without Mischief. It was also thought to be part of a memory game. If you messed up reciting the ever-growing lyrics, you had to forfeit a piece of candy or give a kiss or something. Still others like to interpret hidden meaning in the original lyrics, tying them back to Christianity and the Bible.
And every year, people figure out what the original gifts would have cost. This year’s tally is just shy of $200,000. That’s for 364 gifts mentioned in the original song.
Anyway, back to gardening!
Feel free to memorize my version. Ha! No gifts for doing so or not doing so, but I hope you enjoy it as you begin your final preparations for the first day of Christmas.
And just think, by the twelfth day of Christmas, many of us will be well into reading seed catalogs and sorting out old seeds while we figure out what to sow for our 2024 gardens. We’ll be saving empty milk jugs to use for winter sowing and checking out our seed-starting supplies. We’ll be dreaming of spring!
It will happen in the blink of an eye!
But before it does, I plan to enjoy the Christmas season!
Merry Christmas!
The Gardener’s Twelve Days of Christmas
by
Carol Michel
On the twelfth day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me.
Twelve flowers blooming,
Eleven veggies growing,
Ten birds a-singing,
Nine crickets chirping,
Eight trees a-leafing,
Seven fountains flowing,
Six seeds a-sprouting,
Five garden gnomes,
Four buzzing bees,
Three new spades,
Two seed packets,
And a big pile of fluffy compost.
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