{"id":10556,"date":"2002-09-29T21:16:54","date_gmt":"2002-09-29T21:16:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/?p=10556"},"modified":"2014-09-29T21:19:50","modified_gmt":"2014-09-29T21:19:50","slug":"the-12-days-of-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/the-12-days-of-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"The 12 Days of Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>By Donna Wahlstrom<br \/>\n<\/em><br \/>\nIn the 16th century an unknown author wrote a song that has since become an the all-time <a href=\"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/celebrating-20-years-of-the-merry-forums\/\">Christmas<\/a> carol favorite, &#8220;The 12 Days of <a href=\"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/celebrating-20-years-of-the-merry-forums\/\">Christmas<\/a>.&#8221; Even though the song&#8217;s author has not been revealed there is speculation that the song was written by Jesuits. <\/p>\n<p>During that time, Catholics were prohibited from practicing their faith, so they went underground. The punishment if you were caught was imprisonment, hanging, or worse. Because it was a crime to be a Catholic, it was difficult to educate the youth to their faith so they began penning children&#8217;s lessons about the faith in song and code. <\/p>\n<p>To those of the &#8220;other faith&#8221;, the Protestants, the song was just a pretty melody and nonsensical words. But to the Catholic children it was to help them learn the tenets of their faith, it served as a memory aid. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The 12 Days of Christmas&#8221; celebrates the Nativity and begins 12 days before Epiphany. <\/p>\n<p>According to the Catholics, the symbols in the song mean: <\/p>\n<p>True <a href=\"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/sneaking-christmas\/\">love<\/a> God<br \/>\nMe is each Catholic<br \/>\n2 turtle doves the old and new testaments<br \/>\n3 french hens faith, hope and charity<br \/>\n4 calling birds the four gospels<br \/>\n5 golden rings the first five books of the old testament<br \/>\n6 geese a laying the six days of creation<br \/>\n7 swans a swimming seven gifts of the Holy Spirit<br \/>\n8 maids a milking the eight beatitudes<br \/>\n9 ladies dancing the nine fruits of the holy spirit<br \/>\n10 lords a leaping the ten commandments<br \/>\n11 pipers piping the eleven faithful apostles<br \/>\n12 drummers drumming the twelve points of doctrine in the apostle&#8217;s creed.<\/p>\n<p>And we just thought it was a really long song to sing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Donna Wahlstrom In the 16th century an unknown author wrote a song that has since become an the all-time Christmas carol favorite, &#8220;The 12 Days of Christmas.&#8221; Even though the song&#8217;s author has not been revealed there is speculation that the song was written by Jesuits. During that time, Catholics were prohibited from practicing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10557,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","iawp_total_views":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christmas-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}