12 Days Of Christmas Lyrics

Getting Your 12 Days Of Christmas Lyrics Right

I've been dealing with holiday lyric requests for about a decade now. The 12 Days of Christmas is one of those songs everyone thinks they know but almost nobody can actually reproduce accurately from memory. People show up expecting a quick copy-paste and end up frustrated because every version they find online has some small variation. The traditional lyrics have been around since at least 1780 in their earliest known printed form, so there are a lot of competing versions floating around the internet. Here is the standard text most people are looking for: On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: A partridge in a pear tree.
On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Five golden rings; four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Six geese a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a partridge in a pear tree.
On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Eight maids a-milking, seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Nine ladies dancing, eight maids a-milking, seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Ten lords a-leaping, nine ladies dancing, eight maids a-milking, seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Eleven pipers piping, ten lords a-leaping, nine ladies dancing, eight maids a-milking, seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Twelve drummers drumming, eleven pipers piping, ten lords a-leaping, nine ladies dancing, eight maids a-milking, seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.

The cumulative structure is what makes this tricky. Each verse repeats all the previous gifts in reverse order, and that's where most printouts go wrong. I ran into a specific problem once when a church was printing these for a holiday concert program. The printer had merged the verses and accidentally duplicated the "four calling birds" line three separate times across different verses. It took me about twenty minutes to catch it by going back to the original William Bemrose 1868 edition, which was the version the song's composer Charles Dickens probably based his rendering on. Five golden rings is another common trouble spot. Some modern versions say "five gold rings" and others say "five golden rings." The original 1780 version from Mirth Without Mischief uses "golden," but many family Bibles and school songbooks switched it over the decades. If you're setting this to music or publishing it, pick one and stay consistent. The ring interpretation is also debated among music historians. Some argue the "golden rings" originally referred to pheasants with golden ringed necks rather than actual jewelry, which would change how you'd stage or illustrate those verses entirely. Calling birds has the same kind of variation. A few older manuscripts write "colly birds," which means blackbirds in regional British English from the 1700s. The shift to "calling birds" likely happened because printers in the 1800s thought "colly" was a mistake and auto-corrected it. Neither version is technically wrong, but if someone quotes the song back to you and you said "colly" versus "calling," you'll get into arguments at holiday parties that nobody wins.

Online repositories like Project Gutenberg and the Traditional Christmas Carols archive have the full text freely available, but their formatting is usually raw plain text with no stanza breaks. I recommend pulling from the Oxford Book of Carols edition if you want something reliable, or just copying the text above and running it through a basic formatter. The entire lyrics take about three minutes to read aloud at a normal pace and roughly ninety seconds if you're doing the fast Sing Along with Me album version that some families use. The song is in the public domain, so there are no copyright concerns with reproducing the original lyrics. Modern arrangements and recordings have their own copyrights, but the words themselves are free to use however you need them for programs, websites, or classroom handouts.