Austin Twelve
Twelve Days Of Christmas (The Twelve Days of Christmas) is a Christmas song well known in English speaking countries. There is a nursery rhyme summary that lists twelve gifts that a person said to have received from her lover/herself during the consecutive twelve days of Christmas time. After the announcement of a new gift, the list of precedents is repeated in reverse. Gifts are, in order: a partridge in a pear tree, two doves, three French hens, four blackbirds, five gold rings, six geese laying, seven swans swimming, eight farm girls milking, nine ladies dancing, ten gentlemen leaping, eleven pipers playing, twelve drums beating. Christmas cards with a partridge in a pear tree is an illustration of the first gift: "A partridge in a pear tree"
The basic melody is known in Scandinavia since the sixteenth century. In the early twentieth century, Frederic Austin changed from the passage of five golden rings. (The New Oxford Book of Carols). His version is that it is generally understood in the twenty-first century.
It is the song for the first time proposed as memory game in Mirth without Mischief (Messing without nonsense), a collection of children’s games late eighteenth century (~ 1780). Lady Gomme, a collector of stories and traditional songs helped popularize.
Since 1984, the PNC bank issues each year as Christmas approaches a "Christmas Price Index" indicating the price of each batch of gift (service rate for the characters), and a "Real Cost of Christmas" indicating the cumulative cost of all the gifts. Although designed as a joke, these two indices generally follow changes in the index of consumer prices. The total cost for 2007 was 19 $ 507.19, the highest since the creation of the index; in 1984 it was 12 $ 371.36..