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.