Right. It's a week out from Christmas and the radio in the kitchen has played "The Twelve Days of Christmas" four times since I sat down with my tea. FOUR. And every single time, by about the fifth or sixth day, I find myself doing the thing — leaning forward, bracing, getting ready for the build. You know the one. Five GOLD RINGS. Everybody belts that bit. Nobody knows why it lands so hard. I know why. It lands hard because it's a cumulative song, and a cumulative song is built to do exactly that to you.
And here is the thing I've been waiting all year to tell you: it is the same machine as our song. The Twelve Days and the Rattlin' Bog are cousins. Maybe not first cousins, but cousins all the same, and once you see it you can't unsee it.
Here's how a cumulative song works, in case you've somehow never sat in a pub watching one happen. You start small. One thing. A partridge in a pear tree. A bog in the valley. Then you add a thing — two turtle doves, a tree on the bog — and crucially, you go BACK and sing everything that came before, in reverse, all the way down to the first thing. Then you add another. Then you go all the way back down again. The song doesn't move forward so much as it keeps falling back through itself, getting longer and longer, until the last verse is the whole song in one breath. That's the form. That's it. That's the Rattlin' Bog, that's the Twelve Days, that's Green Grow the Rushes O, that's the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. Same skeleton, different jumpers, every one of them.
What I love about it (and I've gone on about this before in the history of cumulative songs, so stop me if you've heard it) is that it's a MEMORY GAME pretending to be a song. That's its secret. The Twelve Days is genuinely thought by a lot of folklore people to have started as a forfeits game — a thing you'd play at a party where you go round the circle, each person adds a gift and recites all the ones before, and if you fumble it or muddle the order, you pay a forfeit. A kiss, a sweet, a drink, whatever the room was after. Get the partridge wrong on day eleven and you owe the table. That's not a Christmas carol. That's a drinking game with a pear tree in it.
And THAT is the bog, exactly. When we do the Rattlin' Bog late in a session and we're up at the eighth or ninth thing, breathless, racing back down through the feather and the bird and the egg and the nest and the branch and the limb and the tree — half the craic is watching to see who drops the chain. Somebody always does. Somebody puts the feather before the flea (there's no flea in the standard one, I know, I know, that's Mick's eleventh verse business, don't get me started) and the whole table laughs and we start the verse again. It's a game. It was always a game. We just forgot and called it folk music.
Now. The other thing people bring up every December, and I have to address it because someone always emails me. The "secret catechism" thing. You'll have seen it — the chain letter, the well-meaning aunt, the post that goes round every year claiming the Twelve Days was a coded teaching song for persecuted Catholics in England, that the partridge is Jesus and the ten lords a-leaping are the Commandments and so on, a whole hidden Sunday school smuggled past the authorities.
I want to be gentle here because it's a lovely idea and people hold it dear. But lads. There's just no real evidence for it. None. The "secret catechism" reading only shows up in the 1990s — somebody wrote it down, it sounded great, and it spread the way great-sounding things do. There's nothing in the Catholic faith of that era that you'd actually need to HIDE in a partridge. The Commandments weren't illegal. And every single one of those "gifts" maps onto perfectly ordinary stuff a Protestant family would've sung too. It's a forfeits song. A daft, joyful, escalating party game about birds and dancing and people leaping about. That's not a lesser thing than a secret code. I'd argue it's a better one.
What it IS, truly, is a feat of communal endurance. Same as ours. The reason five gold rings hits is that it's the moment the song stops climbing and lets you rest on a long open vowel before it shoves you back into the climb. The Bog has its own version of that — the little breath you steal before the run back down. Every good cumulative song builds in a place to gasp.
So this Christmas, when yer one across the table is murdering the seventh day of Christmas and can't remember if it's swans or geese (it's seven swans, six geese, I will die on this hill), just smile. They're not bad at carols. They're losing a folk game that's hundreds of years old. Buy them a drink. That's the forfeit.
If you want to sing the proper one — ours, I mean — the lyrics are here and they'll do you grand at any table. And if you've a taste for the form now, I've a whole rake of these collected over in the cumulative songs roundup. Go on. It's the season for the long ones.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' has decided the box of Christmas decorations is his now. Sat in it. Will not be moved. He is, by my count, the only thing in this house older than the cardboard, and he's claiming it like a small furry king. Happy Christmas to you all.