Jackson Community Church

Summit, Spirit, Sky: connect to community and creation!

Day 9 of 12 Days of Christmas: Nine ladies dancing

Lady’s Boogie — Langston Hughes

See that lady
Dressed so fine?
She ain’t got boogie-woogie
On her mind—

But if she was to listen
I bet she’d hear,
Way up in the treble
The tingle of a tear.

    Be-Bach!

SONGS about LADIES:

CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM applied to LYRICS (or not)

The symbolism associated with the nine ladies dancing are the nine characteristics of the fruit of the Spirit.  They are found in Galatians 5:22-23.  “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,  (23)  Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.” — https://kscnewmancenter.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/twelve-days-of-christmas-day-9-nine-ladies-dancing/

Jolly News — Dayton Daily News: https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/opinion/jolly-thoughts-the-days-christmas/idfbtmBoOnw95HiAoa31GI/

There is no firm consensus, but two conflicting theories dominate.

The religious theory stems from the suppression of Catholicism during the reigns of certain British Protestant monarchs and Reformists. The theory is that each of these phrases were codes that referred to tenets of Catholicism that would be inadvisable or dangerous to proclaim publicly, but could be used to teach and remind children. … This theory … is dumb. First, not all the things listed were prohibited by the reformists. Secondly, they seem really stretched; it would be much easier to make up a better, more meaningful code that would fit … And thirdly, they merely refer to things like the Ten Commandments, they don’t tell us what they are. That would have to be taught elsewhere … No, the religious connotation seems merely a poor attempt to force something to fit that just doesn’t fit, and long after the fact. Such attempts at religious meanings were not even published until at least 300 years after the song was popular.

It is much more probable that it is merely a child’s game or adult parlor game, similar to many of the “forfeits” games played in Victorian England. In such games, participants have to either have an answer (as in the game of similes) or be able to repeat what has been said before and add something, or the like, or be required to “forfeit” or otherwise be out of the game. This theory is borne out by the fact that there are many variations of the song, many changing the last verses (thus the more complicated ones in any game), so that there may be 12 lords a-leaping, 11 ladies (or dames) dancing (or waiting), 10 pipers piping, nine drummers drumming … even 10 fiddlers fiddling.

There were also many other gifts introduced, including hounds, pheasants, bells, badgers, ships (a-sailing), etc. Obviously the game wouldn’t be very exciting or challenging if everyone knew the phrases like we do today; variations were necessary to make a game of it.

COST of CHRISTMAS According to PNC (full article: https://www.pnc.com/insights/our-commitments/customers/pnc-s-christmas-price-index–soars-for-true-loves.html)

PNC has calculated the cost of true love’s gifts based on the holiday song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”  While the gifts of birds, precious metals and performers haven’t changed, the price to buy them all has soared this year, in line with what consumers are facing in the real world.

PNC’s Christmas Price Index (CPI), based on the price of the gifts in the song, grew by 10.5 percent in 2022, the third highest year-over-year increase in history of PNC’s whimsical holiday tradition. The overall cost to buy all 12 gifts in the song is a record $45,523.27 in 2022.

“True Love’s shopping tab reflects what’s happening in the broader economy this year as commodity and energy prices, along with supply chain disruptions, have driven the cost of goods and services up,” said Amanda Agati, chief investment officer for the PNC Asset Management Group.

Rising Costs Drive Growth

Birds comprise half of the gifts in the CPI and an overall increase in bird and feed prices are a factor in this year’s cost. Prices for the turtle doves ($600), French hens ($318.75) and geese ($720) all jumped by at least 9% in 2022. The partridge ($20.18) – and more pertinently – its pear tree home ($260) grew by nearly 26% this year, primarily due to increased costs of fertilizer for the tree.

Prices in the service economy also jumped in 2022, reflected in the cost of the performance-based gifts at the back half of True Love’s shopping list. Wage and labor cost growth drove prices higher for the Nine Ladies Dancing ($8,308.12), Eleven Pipers Piping ($3,021.40) and Twelve Drummers Drumming ($3,266.93.) The Ten Lords-a-Leaping – priced on the cost of hiring a ballet company – grew an astounding 24 percent year over year to $13,980, supplanting the swans as the most expensive single gift in the index.

The rising costs of goods and services due to inflation likely sent some investors seeking gold. That resulted in growing prices for the precious metal this holiday season and a 39% increase in the cost of the Five Gold Rings ($1,245) for True Loves – the largest year-over-year percentage increase for any of the gifts in the index.

“While it’s unlikely most holiday shoppers are looking to gift the way True Love does, the experience of a higher holiday bill is a reality,” Agati said. “Whether your shopping list includes birds and bands or something more traditional, the cost of production, shipping and labor is up this year, which means price tags follow suit.

Like the index, consumer behavior is the drumbeat for the U.S. economy,” Agati said. “With 70% of U.S. GDP tied to consumption, consumer financial health is key to future market performance. We will be keeping an eye on guiding stars like retail sales, savings rates and consumer sentiment as indicators of the success of this holiday season,” she added.

VARYING LYRICS — Wikipedia

The earliest known publications of the words to The Twelve Days of Christmas were an illustrated children’s book, Mirth Without Mischief, published in London in 1780, and a broadsheet by Angus, of Newcastle, dated to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.

While the words as published in Mirth without Mischief and the Angus broadsheet were almost identical, subsequent versions (beginning with James Orchard Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England of 1842) have displayed considerable variation:

  • In the earliest versions, the word on is not present at the beginning of each verse—for example, the first verse begins simply “The first day of Christmas”. On was added in Austin’s 1909 version, and became very popular thereafter.
  • In the early versions “my true love sent” me the gifts. However, a 20th-century variant has “my true love gave to me”; this wording has become particularly common in North America.
  • In one 19th-century variant, the gifts come from “my mother” rather than “my true love”.
  • Some variants have “juniper tree” or “June apple tree” rather than “pear tree”, presumably a mishearing of “partridge in a pear tree”.
  • The 1780 version has “four colly birds”—colly being a regional English expression for “coal-black” (the name of the collie dog breed may come from this word).This wording must have been opaque to many even in the 19th century: “canary birds”, “colour’d birds”, “curley birds”, and “corley birds” are found in its place. Frederic Austin’s 1909 version, which introduced the now-standard melody, also altered the fourth day’s gift to four “calling” birds, and this variant has become the most popular, although “colly” is still found.
  • “Five gold rings” has often become “five golden rings”, especially in North America In the standard melody, this change enables singers to fit one syllable per musical note.
  • The gifts associated with the final four days are often reordered. For example, the pipers may be on the ninth day rather than the eleventh.

12 Days of Wordlady: Nine Ladies Dancing (full article: https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2014/12/12-days-of-wordlady-nine-ladies-dancing.html)

I have already discussed the interesting story of “dance”, but what about “lady”, a word obviously close to my heart?

It is derived from an Old English word, hlæfdie, a compound of hlæf (bread) and dige (kneader). From its earliest appearance in written records, this “bread kneader” was the woman in charge of a household.

The second element of the compound, dige, is related to the word that gave us “dairy”, as we saw in our last post. The first element, hlæf, evolved into “loaf”, its place as the collective word for the staff of life usurped by “bread”, which started out meaning “a piece of food”. “Give us today our daily loaf” and “I am the loaf of life,” said Anglo-Saxon Gospel translations.

Lady Day — J. Patrick Lewis

for Billie Holiday

Lady could pour you a song,

Coffee and a little cream.

Stir it the whole night long

Into a brown-sugar dream.

Lady could wrap you a note

Up in a velvet night—

Sometimes Manhattan satin,

Always Harlem delight.

Lady Day could sing it

Like nobody ever has

At the Shim Sham Club, Hot Cha Cha,

Joints that swung on jazz.

Her bittersweet songs told Heartbreak,

Meet your sister Pain,

But Lady melted yesterdays

Into beautiful rain.

Lady Birds’ Evening Meetings — Tacey M. Atsitty

After Sylvia Plath’s bee poems

Why am I here again with all of them flittering about? Just to be alone—

It’s what I tell myself, that I too bear black spots on red skin,

It’s how we scamper about before flowing off with our chiffon wings ready to take flight

At a moment’s notice, I am against the wall once again, wainscotting.

The girl on my soccer team leans over to me as I ready to take the seat next to her.

I don’t want no dirty Navajo sitting next to me, she says with her foreleg atop the cold metal chair.

So I take a seat in the row behind before leaving to find an empty room upstairs.

That day the leaders made us binders, wrapped in cotton filling, fabric, and lace.

I got the last pick; well, it wasn’t a pick at all. It was an ugly bright yellow calico print with thick white cotton lace. No one wanted it.

Why did no one tell me to wear a dress?

It’s my first time to this edifice, and I come without—

The girl down the street, the nice one, offers to buy me a white dress with pink florals from Kmart with her credit card. I accept.

This is an emergency, she declares with her card held high in the air.

I am 13 and she 17. Her parents say she can only use it in the event of—

The fabric hugs my ladybug rolls snugly as I step my way to the temple door.

It’s where we learn to really spread our wings in worship, tune our antennae like aluminum to the heavens.

Earlier I said, I could marry anywhere—that it didn’t matter none to me.

I didn’t know it yet, but I was a bug amid blossoms and their vines, winding through unnoticed and unaware

Until a knock came to my door: a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies sits on the welcome mat,

The girls giggling behind the trees, and there in the starlit night, we became a bloom.

bag lady, boxed — Emily Carney

there is a plasticity to the soul that can fit inside

sweaters but not inside drawers. how many times

can one watch the same porn video before one

feels that they have become that porn video. how

many times can you attempt to untangle a cross. i

bought a black dress today — long, and covered with

sequins in the timorous shapes of stars. when i paid for it i

imagined myself sitting in it on a curb drinking beer with you,

so tell me what came first, the beer or the dress. you put

my broken buddha lamp in the hall today because it

“just didn’t fit.” i put you on the right side of my neck

during a sex dream for the same reason. pisces

is the blue cheese of the zodiac signs. are you a gemini?

rose-covered curtains give me anxiety and black gauze

has the polar-opposite effect. does styrofoam turn you

on? it is narcissistic to assume that anything likes to be liked by

you. it is narcissistic to assume that anything matters if

you don’t. i would like to be a man ray photograph

more than i would like to be a person. i would like to

be the glass carnival wallpaper at your lips more than

i would like to be a person. would you fuck me against

your window, even though it is phobic to be naked

in public? i have a feeling that although you are a poet,

you think that poets are phony. i have a feeling that it’s

all a joke to you and i like it, but i am not similar.

your lips came to me in a dream, red and shiny like

cartoon wool. your lips came to me in a honda

and i loved them away, and i pushed them anyway.

i wanted to be a porn star, your father wanted you to

make boxes. we both felt upset about the wanting. we both

learned that it is important to feel guiltless about smashing guitars.

i am a 5 p.m. person who buys cardigans to look like

trash. you are a 9 p.m. person who likes both

kinds of nylon against your fingers. i couldn’t

concentrate in yoga because i was fixated

on how much you’d like the ass of the

girl in front of me. i’m starting to believe that purple

hair is cliché and i don’t like it. i let myself get wet in the

rain today because i wanted you to be proud of me. when are my

poems going to stop you.

this is just the long string of molecules.

this is just the long.

Day 9 of 12 Days of Christmas: Nine ladies dancing
Scroll to top