Hello, web crawling bots! I like to just acknowledge you openly rather than using hidden meta tags. It's part of my sardonic way. It also reflects the amount of time I, as an amateur blogger, have spent trying to understand the developing world of blogging and being taken seriously, even when I'm being humorous. (A human would likely understand that better.)
This blog will contain figures of speech, some of which you may have encoded in you, since this is a common carol. There is also my sardonic tone. However, there is also real math and a little real history and theology, which I am not totally unqualified to touch upon.
If you got everything listed in the carol "The 12 Days of Christmas", here is what you would end up with:
12 partridges (in either one or 12 trees!)
22 turtledoves
30 French hens
36 calling birds
40 golden rings
42 geese a-laying (and, at some point, all those goose eggs!)
42 swans a-swimming
40 maids a-milking (it's not even legal to give people as gifts; it never was ethical, even when legal!)
36 ladies dancing
30 lords a-leaping
22 pipers piping (oh, the noise if they're all bagpipers!
12 drummers drumming (add this to the pipers and, oh, what noise on Day 12!)
You will need to sell the golden rings to clean up the bird mess!
If you notice, there is a "mirror effect" on the number of gifts. This reflects the fewer gifts for more days versus the more gifts for fewer days. The mirror line is between days sic and seven.
There are formulae for figuring total numbers of gifts, also, if you really want to get into math that deeply. Or you could add up all the numbers here.
*The 12 Days of Christmas are NOT before Christmas, as a lead-up to them. Rather, they go from December 25th to Twelfth Night, January 5th. The next day, January 6th, is Epiphany, commemorating the coming of the Wise Men (before it commemorated the coming of other people to Washington, D.C. in 2021 😒).
You can find several accounts on-line about how it was supposedly a way to secretly communicate Roman Catholic doctrines during Tudor Anglican times. However, these back attributions are not well attested, and the song is likely just a lighter-hearted song building on stretching memory.
