That leaves five
remaining lines, each of
which appears to feature
a gift of human beings:
maids, ladies, lords, pipers
and drummers. I suggest
that, given that each of
the first seven lines refers
to a bird, so do these.Tr e e d r u m m e r s
Working backwards,
surely 12 drummers
drumming are
woodpeckers, and
11 pipers piping
are sandpipers?
Woodpeckers are often regarded as
harbingers of rain, perhaps because their
drumming is easier to hear in that period
of calm before a storm. They also have
many folk names: from ‘yaffle’ for the green
woodpecker (after its laughing call) to ‘hew-
hole’ and ‘pick-a-tree’. Oddly, while there is
plenty of folklore about woodpeckers, there
is virtually none about sandpipers, even
though the common sandpiper would have
been a familiar sight to our ancestors.
The ninth and tenth lines in the carol
are a pair: nine ladies dancing and 10 lords
a-leaping. What else could they refer to
but two of the most elaborate courtshipThe carol’s fourth line is usually sung as
four calling birds, but that is a mishearing
of the word ‘colly’ – meaning ‘coaly’ or black- so they are actually blackbirds. But that
causes problems for people who interpret
five gold rings as referring to the blackbird,
because of the yellow ring around the male’s
eye. I suggest that ‘gold rings’ is a corruption
of ‘yoldring(s)’, a now obsolete Scottish
folk name for the yellowhammer; another
farmland bird in decline. The yoldring (spelt
‘yorlin’) also features in a rather risqué song
by the poet Robert Burns.
Below: Victorian
greetings cards
cemented the image
of the robin as a
cheerful herald of
Christmastime.Swans (above)
a-swimming and
geese (right)
a-laying seem
straightforward,
but does pipers
piping refer to
the antics of
small riverside
wader (below)
the sandpiper?CHRISTMAS BIRDS