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Day 6 of 12 Days of Christmas: Six geese

By jacksonnhccPosted on Posted in Advent & Christmas, Home, Weekly MeditationsTagged ,

Wild Geese — Frederick Peterson

How oft against the sunset sky or moon
I watched that moving zigzag of spread wings
In unforgotten Autumns gone too soon,
In unforgotten Springs!
Creatures of desolation, far they fly
Above all lands bound by the curling foam;

In misty lens, wild moors and trackless sky
These wild things have their home.
They know the tundra of Siberian coasts.
And tropic marshes by the Indian seas;
They know the clouds and night and starry hosts
From Crux to Pleiades.
Dark flying rune against the western glow—
It tells the sweep and loneliness of things,
Symbol of Autumns vanished long ago.
Symbol of coming Springs!

SONGS about GEESE:

Wild Geese — Mary Oliver
 
            You do not have to be good.
            You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
            You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
            Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
            Meanwhile the world goes on.
            Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers. 
            Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
            are heading home again.
            Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
                        the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The Goose Explains — Amos Russel Wells

t was a goose who sadly cried,
“Alas! Alas! The farm is wide,
And large the barnyard company,
But no one ever looks at me;
There really seems to be no use,
Or praise, or glory, for a goose.

They pet the dog whose bark and bite
Scare tramps by day and thieves by night;
But when I bravely stand on guard,
And drive intruders from the yard,
They laugh at me. The kitten plays,
And all admire her cunning ways;
But when I venture in the room,
To play, in turn, some stick or broom
Soon drives me out. Those birds they call
Canaries cannot sing at all
In my sweet fashion; yet their lay
Is praised—from mine folks turn away.
They prize the horse who pulls the cart;
But when I try to do my part,
And mount the shafts to help him draw,
They whip me off. Last week I saw
Two stupid horses pull a plow,
I watched the work, I learned just how;
Then, with my bill, I did the same
In flower-beds, and got only blame.
It really seems of little use
To try to help—when one’s a goose!”

SYMBOLISM THEORIES: Six Geese A-Laying

As you will recall—for by now it’s an ear worm that you can’t stop humming—the 12 days begin on Christams Day with the partridge. On 5 or 6 of the following days, the gifts are birds, interrupted musically, thematically and enigmatically by those 5 golden rings… There have also been many Christian interpretations of this song but really no evidence to support any of them. I find the secular interpretations to be far more interesting and valid.
      In the 237 years since the rhyme was first published in English, there have been at least 20 different versions of the words, especially with respect to the birds. Some of these variants are undoubtedly Mondegreens, but they were often probably just attempts to make the words more relevant to a contemporary audience…
    The birds of days 6 and 7—the geese and the swans—round out the culinary theme before the song turns to dance providing some exercise after all that feasting, and chores that may have been neglected. — Robert Montgomerie, American Ornithology, full article: https://americanornithology.org/four-calling-birds/

One of the suggestions for the origin of The Twelve Days of Christmas is that it was intended as a ‘catechism song’, used by young Catholics to help them learn the tenets of their faith. … However, this theory has been widely refuted and although the origins of the song are unknown it’s likely that it is secular in nature, perhaps written as a memory game.
      If we continue with the medieval banqueting theme … Goose has been on the menu for Christmas dating back to the ancient Greeks. During the Middle Ages it was also the centrepiece of the feast of Michaelmas on the 29th September celebrating the end of the harvest.
      There is a legend that Queen Elizabeth I was dining on goose on the 29th of September when she received news of the destruction of the Spanish Armada and declared “Henceforth shall a goose commemorate this great victory!” therefore decreeing that goose should always be served at Michaelmas. However, the story is almost certainly apocryphal as a thanksgiving service had already taken place at St Paul’s Cathedral almost a month earlier.
     The goose referred to in this verse is probably the greylag goose, (Anser anser), and the ancestor of all domesticated geese. It was a favourite bird at medieval feasts and in Magia Naturalis, a work of popular science published in 1558, there is a recipe for a goose … — Birdspot.uk, full article: https://www.birdspot.co.uk/culture/the-birds-of-the-twelve-days-of-christmas

The gift of “six geese a-laying” represents another animal, food gift. While there are 30 species of wild geese in the world, the most likely bird to be this gift is the graylag goose (Anser anser). There are also more than 125 breeds of domestic geese that have been specifically bred for laying. While not as prolific as three French hens, each domestic goose can lay as many as 20 eggs per year. This gift, however, is more likely to refer to the meat, but could also be the feathers of the resulting flock, as goose down is particularly prized for winter wear and insulation, ideal for a holiday gift during the coldest season of the year. — Melissa Maentz, Farmer’s Almanac

The lyrics for the sixth day of Christmas take us back to the first story found in the Bible. Each egg is a day in creation, the time when the world was “hatched” or formed by God. The six days of creation are the first demonstration in the history of the world of God giving his people all the good gifts which they need. — Rev. Joel Gaertner

The Six Geese a Laying verse represents the fact that the world (and all that is in it) was made, by God, in six days. Just as eggs are the symbol for new life and creation, so the geese laying eggs presented the whole story of God moving His hand over the void to create life.  — Hampshire Pewter

This was not originally a Catholic song, no matter what you hear on the Internet. … Neutral reference books say this is nonsense. If there was such a catechism device, a secret code, it was derived from the original secular song. It’s a derivative, not the source. — William Studwell for Religion New Service

MORE about TWELVE DAYS of CHRISTMAS — Tanya Pai, vox.com, full article: https://www.vox.com/21796404/12-days-of-christmas-explained
To calculate the cost of all the gifts in “The 12 Days of Christmas,” I’ll turn to the PNC financial services group’s annual Christmas Price Index, which PNC has been putting out since 1984; it calculates the cost of all the gifts in the song based on current market rates. Given the current pace of inflation, this smorgasbord of gift-giving is extra-costly this year: The total for 2022 comes to a whopping $45,523.27, up 10.5 percent from 2021 prices, or $197,071.09 if you count each mention of an item separately (which would amount to 364 gifts in all) — a 9.8 percent increase from last year.
     The rising price of items like gold and fertilizer means those five rings ($1,245, a 39 percent increase) and the infamous partridge in a pear tree ($280.18, up nearly 26 percent) are costlier than ever. Some things haven’t changed at all, though — as the index points out, the federal minimum wage hasn’t increased since 2009, meaning the rate for eight maids a-milking is holding steady at a relative steal of $58.
     No matter the cost, though, actually giving someone all this stuff is probably not a great idea; just think of all the bird poo.

ALSO:

     If you ate all of the birds in one day, including the pheasant pie, but not including all the trimmings for the other dishes, and subtracted the energy you expended milking, dancing, leaping, and drumming, you’d have consumed 2,384 net calories. That’s really not bad, considering the average American Thanksgiving dinner adds up to about 4,500 calories.

Day 6 of 12 Days of Christmas: Six geese
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