DOES it help to know that Auld Lang Syne means ‘old long since’?
Not really. We’re just going to belt it out at some point over the festive season, as we usually do, instinctively doing a corrupted version of a circle dance that is thousands of years old and printed in our genes.
None of it has to make sense. If it did, nobody would send Christmas cards to people they see every day or give presents to people they don’t like.
It snows once every four years in Bethlehem, but snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, in that bleak midwinter, long ago.
Christina Rossetti was a romantic songwriter, not a meteorologist.
Does anyone really like sprouts? Has anyone ever eaten figgy pudding?
Why is Christmas not Christmas without a boat-shaped wooden box of dates with a camel-train on the lid?
I share with reader Eric Appleyard a degree of puzzlement at the weird and wonderful words of The Twelve Days of Christmas.
He reckons it’s a Catholic catechism, a way of teaching the principal elements of Roman belief secretly without incurring the wrath of the authorities who, from 1558 to 1829 in England, frowned upon Popery.
I like that explanation, but before we have a look at that in detail, it’s only fair to warn it may be only as genuine as the real name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch or the Grave of Gelert at Beddgelert, both of them 19th century attempts at drumming up a bit of tourist trade.
The Days of Christmas song apparently originated in France, reaching this country in 1780, and its rhythms suggest a folk song origin of the popular ‘memory and forfeit’ type.
‘I went shopping and bought an apple’.
‘I went shopping and bought an apple and a banana.’
‘I went shopping and bought an apple, a banana and a carrot ... ’
As the words pass round the table, it becomes harder and harder to remember the sequence, and those who fail (and may have an alcoholically induced reason for failing) are obliged to perform a forfeit.
This makes it an ideal game for Christmas, when the family comes round, the party hats have split and Uncle Alec, full of brown ale and swear-words, is getting close to giving Cousin Roger a knuckle sandwich.
I might add, before we start, that good old British partridges are ground birds, rarely perching in anything taller than a heather clump.
