Question 12 days of Christmas.

Gonna take this in a diff direction. Must stay current with the 12 days of Christmas, Whateley style.

On the first day of Christmas Kodiac gave to Loophole; A Jet Pack ride to the stratosphere.

Should be the other way around.

Hmmm....

On the fifth day of Xmas Walki-Talkie gave to Kayda

Five...Golden...Kids!
Four singing sirens
Three French Beret-Mafia
Two carapace birds
And a buffalo up a pear tree.

Astrodragon wrote: And a buffalo up a pear tree.

Reminds me of an old (and terrible) joke:

"Why do elephants paint their toenails red?"
"Why?"
"So they can hide in cherry trees!"
"I've never seen an elephant in a cherry tree."
"They hide pretty well, don't they?"

Indeed.

"Why do elephants paint the bottom of their feet yellow?"

"So they cant be seen when they are floating upside down in a bowl of custard..."

Meanwhile, a favourite of secondary school mathematics teachers is to give their pupils a list of problems based on taking the lyrics at face value - i.e. by the end of the 12 days, the lovestruck fool with more money than sense has delivered 12 partridges, 12 pear trees, 22 turtle doves, 30 french hens, 36 calling / colly birds, 40 gold rings (perhaps the most useful of the gifts!) and so on. Problems included "How many birds?" and "How many legs?" (always a good one to catch the unwary as each maid-a-milking has 9 legs - 4 on the cow, 2 on the maid and 3 on the stool!).

Sometimes there's also an extension activity along the lines of the Christmas Price Index - guesstimate the costs of buying / hiring each item, then work out the total cost.

the maids a milking could have 4 legged stools you know, so the right answer would be 10 in that case.

And ACTUALLY, there exists a sort of special *ONE*-legged stool that is tied to one's bottom by a belt. It was invented *specifically* to milk cows (since the person who is milking has too much on his/her mind to carry a stool too)

Not to mention, it's ten maids a milking, no mention of how many cows or stools at all, we only know how many maids it is, for all,we know it could be a whole herd of cows.

Meanwhile, some interpretations have the five gold rings as birds - the ringed pheasant, goldfinches or canaries - although the earliest known publication (1780) clearly shows jewellery.

The original list was 1 partridge (in a pear tree), 2 turtle doves, 3 french hens, 4 colly birds, 5 gold rings, 6 geese a-laying^*, 7 swans a-swimming, 8 maids a-milking, 9 drummers drumming (as if all the birds weren't enough to keep you and your neighbours awake at night!), 10 pipers piping (imagine if they were bagpipes... now you've got half the town annoyed with you!), 11 ladies dancing and 12 Lords a-leaping (given they get £300/day just for turning up at Westminster, they'd probably demand substantially more to turn up and leap around); while the most popular set of lyrics today swap around the hires: 9 ladies, 10 lords, 11 pipers and 12 drummers.

As for its origins, "The best known English version was first printed in English in 1780 in a little book intended for children, Mirth without Mischief, as a Twelfth Night 'memories-and-forfeit' game, in which a leader recited a verse, each of the players repeated the verse, the leader added another verse, and so on until one of the players made a mistake, with the player who erred having to pay a penalty, such as offering up a kiss or a sweet." (Wiki)

Of course, such a game would be useless at Whateley - you'd probably need to enumate a few hundred / thousand / million items to catch out those with eidetic memories...

* What's the standard incubation time for a goose egg? If any are fertilised, that could raise the leg count even more!

Incubation time for a Canadian Goose is about a month, but they nest in March and April!

While you are all discussing the Twelve days of Christmas, I'll just leave this classic here:

Well you see where the problem arose for that poor man is that he wasn't being practical.
Being a regular partridge hunter, I know that a bit of bacon, rice, soy sauce and partridge makes a fine dish. And baked dove is quite nice especially with some noodles and light plum sauce. The french hens can be coooked like cornish hens or turned into a delightful soup. Four calling birds are a little on the small side, but with careful butchering they'll add a nice flavour to french hen soup. With the six geese, just make sure you have a big freezer (possibly by pawning the five golden rings), take a few hours to pluck the feathers and you've got at least six feasts taken care of for the year. With the swans, I've never eaten them but I've heard you can treat them just like big turkeys, just make sure you have a really big freezer or send them off to friends after they've been plucked.
The milkmaids are annoying, but think of all the steaks and roasts you can get from their cows. When the lords and ladies come around set them up in an assembly line and get butchering. Sell the meat, then kick the people out and you've made a profit.

Plus, I understand that pears make very sauces and glazes.

True. So the song is actually a grocery list. Just keep the milk maids working as you butcher the cows and you have milk, cheese and butter as well.

Not to mention that all those goose and swan feathers make nice pillows.

or a down filled comforter.

Or extra income with the umm ladies as with entertainment.

That really changes the way those ladies are dancing.

A Parody still remembered by some of us older folk. I think I first heard it in 1985.

State of Yugoslavia
(to 12 days of Christmas)

The state of Yugoslavia is a coun-te-ry
with only one political party.

The state of Yugoslavia is a country,
with two alphabets,
BUT only one political party.

3 religions
4 languages
5 slavic, (and) ethnic national identities
6 republics
7 million peasants
8 billion pigeons
9 fighter bombers
10 party chairmen
11 surviving dissidents
12 trillion American dollars.

Probably one of the more apt parodies was that of Bob Rivers and co (although of course YMMV on how many of the twelve you actually find annoying - e.g. while synthetic trees may get frowned upon as not natural, they're far less hassle, far easier to maintain and can be reused year after year; while the increasing prevalence of Christmas Lights using LEDs eliminates much of the problem of #2):

Finding a Christmas tree
Rigging up the lgihts
Hangovers
Sending Christmas cards
Five months of bills
Facing the in-laws
Chuggers (= charity muggers)
Whining children
Finding parking spaces
"Batteries not included"
Stale TV specials
Singing Christmas carols