In his book The Carols of Christmas: A Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Holiday Songs, choirmaster, composer, and music historian Andrew Gant explains that there is no clear linear path to how we got the current lyrics to "The 12 Days of Christmas." Like so many Christmas carols, which began as regional folk music, it's one of those songs that just sort of organically morphed over time. As Gant puts it: "It might really just be a list of things seen around the farmhouse and the village."
Therefore, it's a song destined to remain a bit of a head-scratcher, one of those outlier party songs that's just sort of fun to sing in a group (or at least the "FIVE GOLD RINGS!" part, as Eddie Izzard reminded us), and fun to wonder about. How did we get this song, in this order, with these gifts? In the early 1990s, one intrepid TV program set out to explain it all, and in the process gave us one of the strangest family Christmas specials of all time.
Produced by Goodtimes Entertainment and released on NBC over the 1993 holiday season, The 12 Days of Christmas is one of those outlier half-hour animated programs that didn't come from any established franchise, character, or even a better-known story song like the Rankin/Bass-produced Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) or Frosty the Snowman (1969) before it.
Based on an original story by Rankin/Bass veteran Romeo Muller, The 12 Days of Christmas was instead an odd standalone, an attempt to provide an origin story for the song from which it took its name. The results aren't especially Christmassy, and the special eventually found its way to the dusty back shelves of the holiday programming archives, where it wouldn't be re-aired or remembered by most people.
But I am not most people. As a Christmas special obsessive since I was old enough to remember them, armed with a VHS tape packed with early '90s holiday programming, I was a kid obsessed with this strange, silly seasonal relic. And, because I recently discovered the whole thing is available on YouTube, I'd like to tell you all about it.
So, there's the song, right? You know the song, or at least parts of it. Lots of poultry, some drummers, some dancers, five golden rings. It's an odd mix of items — so how could you possibly explain why they're all grouped together? Well, to do that you have to go to a fairy tale world, where there are two castles next door to each other.
In one, a brave and pompous knight named Sir Carolboomer (Larry Kenny). In the other, the King (Earl Hammond) and his daughter, the melancholic and so over it Princess Silverbell (Donna Vivino), who chews gum, paints her nails, and will only marry one of her many suitors if he can make her laugh. Desperate to win the Princess' heart, Carolboomer orders his timid squire, Hollyberry (the great Phil Hartman), to steal her Christmas list so he can buy her everything she wants and, thus, make her happy. Oh — and everyone is a talking, dog-like animal to make things cuter. Think TaleSpin with knights, castles, and aggressive pastel colors which make it look more like Easter than Christmas.
Here's where it gets weird (Here's here it gets weird? I know, just go with it.). Hollyberry heads to the king's castle, but the Princess is holding two lists at the time he makes his move, and he snags the wrong one. The list he has is actually the Royal Puzzlemaster's list of crossword puzzle answers for the King, because his highness hates being stumped by his weekly crossword. As you might have guessed, the puzzle answers feature a Partridge, Calling Birds, French Hens, Golden Rings, Maids-a-Milking, and so on.
When Carolboomer and Hollyberry read the list, they just assume the Princess is a weirdo who wants a lot of birds and her own mobile dairy farm, and Hollyberry is quickly dispatched to get all of these weird gifts together. He begins with the Partridge (Marcia Savella), who also narrates the story in a Mrs. Potts-style because it was the early '90s, and she tells him she refuses to go anywhere without her beloved pear tree. Thus, a Partridge in a Pear Tree.
Naturally, the princess does not want a Partridge in a Pear Tree, despite the Partridge's charming British accent and sense of humor, and sends the gift back. Does Carolboomer think he's made a mistake? He definitely does not! In fact, Carolboomer is so convinced they have to keep going through all the gifts that he tells Hollyberry he will literally murder him if he doesn't keep getting the presents. Carolboomer also insists the Princess is just playing "hard to get." Is this children's animated holiday special secretly about toxic masculinity? Maybe!
So the gifts keep coming. The Princess is allergic to birds, but she gets Turtle Doves, French Hens, Calling Birds, and Swans-a-Swimming. She thinks the Golden Rings are nice, but their appeal is quickly diminished by the continued arrival of birds, because Hollyberry has to bring every single gift back every single day.
Along the way, the Princess' attendants get really into it, and turn every day of Christmas into a musical parody opportunity. An Elvis impersonator shows up, and a Michael Jackson impersonator for the youths to enjoy, and they might even be the same guy. This is the most fun the staff has had around the palace in years, and to make things even better, all the gifts are turning out to be the right answers for the King's crossword, so he's having a great time too!
With her father's goofy fun in mind, the Princess lets the gifts keep arriving, until it's time for 12 Lords-a-Leaping. Why are the Lords leaping? Because Hollyberry gave them new boots lined with chili peppers. Where did he get chili peppers in this approximation of medieval Europe? Christmas magic, that's where.
Anyway, the chili peppers kick in, the Lords start leaping, and the Princess starts laughing. Thinking he's finally won, Carolboomer shows up to propose, but you guessed it, the Princess is interested in the guy who did all the hard work, and wants to marry Hollyberry instead.
Let that be a lesson to you, kids: If you just keep giving the hot lady increasingly ridiculous presents, she will be won over through sheer force of the lunacy of the moment.
And that's The 12 Days of Christmas, a holiday special that attempted to provide a satisfying origin story for a holiday song that's really just a list of nonsense. It's not hard to understand why it didn't get a lot of play in the years following its release, or why it hasn't risen through the ranks of Christmas classics, but you know what? For all its narrative stretching and oddly un-festive design work, there's something undeniably charming about it.
A lot of that is Muller's story (imagine this thing in the Rankin/Bass Animagic style!), but the Japanese animation presided over by Masaki Iizuka and, of course, Hartman's voice acting have a lot to do with it too. It deserves to be remembered as, at the very least, a bonkers holiday oddity, because in an age when almost all of the animated holiday specials are franchise spinoffs, we need more oddities at Christmas.
