![]() The songs gifts are hidden meanings to the teachings of the faith. Hanging, drawing and quartering involved hanging a person by the neck until they had almost, but not quite, suffocated to death then the party was taken down from the gallows, and disembowelled while still alive and while the entrails were still lying on the street, where the executioners stomped all over them, the victim was tied to four large farm horses, and literally torn into five parts – one to each limb and the remaining torso. “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was written in England as one of the “catechism songs” to help young Catholics learn the tenets of their faith – a memory aid, when to be caught with anything in writing indicating adherence to the Catholic faith could not only get you imprisoned, it could get you hanged, or shortened by a head – or hanged, drawn and quartered, a rather peculiar and ghastly punishment I’m not aware was ever practiced anywhere else. ![]() ![]() But it had a quite serious purpose when it was written.It is a good deal more than just a repetitious melody with pretty phrases and a list of strange gifts.Ĭatholics in England during the period 1558 to 1829, when Parliament finally emancipated Catholics in England, were prohibited from ANY practice of their faith by law – private OR public. To most it’s a delightful nonsense rhyme set to music. You’re all familiar with the Christmas song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” I think. Here we have an article that combines both these forms and posits that a mirthful Christmas festival song about romantic gift-giving actually originated as a coded catechism used by persecuted Catholics: Two common forms of modern folklore are claims that familiar old bits of rhyme and song (such as the nursery rhyme “ Ring Around the Rosie“) encode “hidden” meanings which have been passed along for centuries, and claims that common objects of secular origin - particularly objects associated with Christmas (such as the candy cane) - were deliberately created to embody symbols of Christian faith.
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