Right. So it's a week before Christmas, Rattlin' is asleep in the good chair (the one I'm meant to sit in), and I've had three mince pies and a notion. The notion is this: The Rattlin' Bog and The Twelve Days of Christmas are cousins. Actual cousins. Same bones. Same daft engine under the hood. And once you see it you cannot un-see it, so I'm sorry in advance for what I'm about to do to your December.
Here's the thing. They're both what folklorists call CUMULATIVE songs. Chain songs. Some people say "accumulative" but I think that's just showing off. The idea is simple and the idea is genius. You sing a thing. Then you sing a NEW thing, and then you sing the first thing again. Then a newer thing, the second thing, the first thing. On and on, the list growing backwards down the verse like a snowball going downhill, until by the end you're rattling off the whole lot in one breath and the room is either laughing or dying or both.
In the bog it's the tree in the bog, and the bog down in the valley-oh. Then the branch on the tree and the tree in the bog and the bog down in the valley-oh. You know how this goes. By the time you reach the flea (the CLIMAX, do not argue with me) you're doing the whole architecture from flea back to bog without stopping for air.
In Twelve Days it's five gold rings. It's always five gold rings. That's the famous bit, the bit everyone slows down and bellows. But the STRUCTURE is the exact same trick. A partridge in a pear tree, then two turtle doves AND a partridge in a pear tree, then three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. Each day you add one and then sing back down the whole inventory to the partridge. It's the bog. It's the bog wearing a Santa hat.
I'm not the first to notice this, I should say. The trad lads worked it out long before me. But I want to tell you WHY it matters and not just that it's true, because the why is the lovely part.
These songs are built to teach themselves. That's the secret. You don't learn The Rattlin' Bog by sitting down with the words. You learn it by being IN it — by the fourth verse you've heard the bottom of the list four times, the fifth verse five times, so by the time it's flying you couldn't forget the bog if you tried. The repetition isn't padding. The repetition is the whole teaching method. Same with Twelve Days. Nobody studies Twelve Days. You absorb it. You've sung "a partridge in a pear tree" so many times by the twelfth day that it's carved into you. The song is its own classroom and you didn't even notice you were in school.
There's a memory science to it that a clever woman on our forum could explain better than me (she's a mathematician at Trinity, she's done actual papers on the bog, I'm not making that up). But the folk-tradition version is just: people couldn't read, or didn't have the words written down, and a song that drills itself into your head is a song that SURVIVES. It gets remembered. It gets passed to the next mouth. Cumulative songs are basically the original viral content, lads. They were engineered to be sticky four hundred years before anyone said "engagement."
Now. Twelve Days has a respectable churchy reputation — all the holly and the candles and the carol services. And the bog has a slightly rowdier reputation — all the pints and the racing and the falling over at the flea verse. But strip the costumes off and they're the same animal. There's a famous old theory that the gifts in Twelve Days were secret Catholic catechism in penal times, the partridge being Christ and so on, and honestly? Probably not true. Folklorists have mostly shot it down. It's a grand story but the evidence is thin, and I'd rather tell you the truth than a nice lie. What IS true is that it was first printed in an English children's book around 1780, as a memory-and-forfeit game — you'd sing it round the room and whoever fluffed a verse had to pay a kiss or a sweet or a forfeit. Which, if you've ever watched a session try to keep the bog upright after midnight, is EXACTLY the same game we still play. Mess up the order, buy the round. Nothing's changed. Nothing.
And it's not just these two. The cousins go on. Green Grow the Rushes-O is one of the strangest and oldest of them — twelve symbols, half of them genuinely no one knows the meaning of anymore, and it'll wreck your head in the best way. I put the whole thing in the songbook if you want to lose an evening. There's the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (a horror story, technically). There's One Man Went to Mow. Whole flocks of them across every language, all running the same beautiful machine. I went down this rabbit hole properly and wrote up the longer history of the whole family because one blog post couldn't hold it.
So that's my Christmas gift to you. Next time you're at the table and somebody starts five gold rings, you'll know — that's the bog. That's our song in disguise. And if you fancy it, you could do worse than slide straight from Twelve Days into the bog itself while everyone's already warmed up and counting. Half the rest of the songbook runs on the same fuel anyway.
Go on. Try the segue. Report back.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' has decided the Christmas tree is a personal enemy this year. Three baubles down already and it's only the 18th. I'll keep yis posted, it's basically a cumulative song at this point, one ornament added to the floor each day.