The Twelve Dels of Christmas: My Festive Tales from Life and Only Fools

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Fay McKay, an American musical comedian, is best known for "The Twelve Daze of Christmas", a parody in which the gifts were replaced with various alcoholic drinks, resulting in her performance becoming increasingly inebriated over the course of the song. A program hosted by Tom Arnold, The 12 Days of Redneck Christmas, which takes a look at Christmas traditions, premiered on CMT in 2008.

Irish actor Frank Kelly recorded "Christmas Countdown" in 1982 in which a man named Gobnait O'Lúnasa receives the 12 Christmas gifts referenced in the song from a lady named Nuala.As each gift is received, Gobnait gets increasingly upset with the person who sent them, as said gifts wreak havoc in the house where he lives with his mother. The practice was for one person in the company to recite the first three lines; a second, the four following; and so on; the person who failed in repeating her portion correctly being subjected to some trifling forfeit. Another suggestion is that an old English drinking song may have furnished the idea for the first gift. Les Douze Mois" ("The Twelve Months") (also known as "La Perdriole"—"The Partridge") [36] is another similar cumulative verse from France that has been likened to The Twelve Days of Christmas.

The carol, whose words were first published in England in the late eighteenth century, has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 68. The gifts include: one feather, two geese, three sides of meat, four sheep, five cows, six oxen, seven dishes, eight ponies, nine banners, ten barrels, eleven goats, twelve men, thirteen hides, fourteen rounds of cheese and fifteen deer. Jasper Carrott performed "Twelve Drinks of Christmas" where he appears to be more inebriated with each successive verse.Peter Kennedy recorded the Copper family of Sussex, England singing a version in 1955 which differs slightly from the common version, [81] whilst Helen Hartness Flanders recorded several different versions in the 1930s and 40s in New England, [82] [83] [84] [85] where the song seems to have been particularly popular. According to The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, "Suggestions have been made that the gifts have significance, as representing the food or sport for each month of the year. The twelve days in the song are the twelve days starting with Christmas Day to the day before Epiphany (5 January). John Julius Norwich's 1998 book, The Twelve Days of Christmas (Correspondence), uses the motif of repeating the previous gifts on each subsequent day, to humorous effect.

A similar cumulative verse from Scotland, "The Yule Days", has been likened to "The Twelve Days of Christmas" in the scholarly literature. A special Creature Comforts orchestral arrangement of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" was made by British animator Nick Park and Aardman Animations. It is mentioned in the section on "Chain Songs" in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Indiana University Studies, Vol. A large number of different melodies have been associated with the song, of which the best known is derived from a 1909 arrangement of a traditional folk melody by English composer Frederic Austin.

Starring Penelope Keith, it imagines the increasingly exasperated response of the recipient of the "twelve days" gifts. The earliest known publications of the words to The Twelve Days of Christmas were an illustrated children's book, Mirth Without Mischief, published in London in 1780, and a broadsheet by Angus, of Newcastle, dated to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. The video game StarCraft: Broodwar released a new map named Twelve Days of StarCraft with the song which was adopted a new lyric featured units from the game by Blizzard on 23 December 1999. Importance [certainly has] long been attached to the Twelve Days, when, for instance, the weather on each day was carefully observed to see what it would be in the corresponding month of the coming year. However, a 20th-century variant has "my true love gave to me"; this wording has become particularly common in North America.

Some authors suggest a connection to a religious verse entitled "Twelfth Day", found in a thirteenth century manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge; [47] [48] [49] this theory is criticised as "erroneous" by Yoffie. Christian rock band Relient K released a recording of the song on their 2007 album Let It Snow, Baby. Multiple sources confirm that it is a dialectal word, found in Somerset and elsewhere, meaning "black", so "colly birds" are blackbirds. Perry Como recorded a traditional version of "Twelve Days of Christmas" for RCA Victor in 1953, but varied the lyrics with "11 Lords a Leaping", "10 Ladies Dancing", and "9 Pipers Piping". In the 12 Disasters of Christmas movie, the song has actually been created by the Mayas to ensure that a prophecy of the end of the world be foretold among europeans even after the destruction of the Mayas' civilization.The index has been humorously criticised for not accurately reflecting the true cost of the gifts featured in the Christmas carol. Twelfth Night is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the evening of January 5th, the day before Epiphany, which traditionally marks the end of Christmas celebrations". This is a traditional English singing game but the melody of five gold rings was added by Richard[ sic] Austin whose fine setting (Novello) should be consulted for a fuller accompaniment. Assuming the gifts are repeated in full in each round of the song, then a total of 364 items are delivered by the twelfth day.