Lol, eight maids a milking… Slaves. He’s sending you slaves darling.
Or he’s letting you in on a very specific fetish…
Consider the gender distribution of:
- eight maids a-milking
- nine ladies dancing
- ten lords a-leaping
- eleven pipers piping
- twelve drummers drumming
Some deep fetish shit is about to go down
Hey them pipers and drummers could be ladies! Its current year
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Or hired to do a show, since English isn’t that specific. Being gifted someone dancing doesn’t usually mean you own that person. It just means someone was paid to dance as a show for you.
Plus, you have to provide room in your house for a huge number of new lodgers. Drummers, pipers, lords, ladies, maids… and then you’ve got to find a place for all the birds.
Your “true love” is clearly taking advantage of you by unloading all of this onto you and calling it a gift.
I think they’re for eating
It’s 184 birds, 140 humans, 40 rings, and 12 trees. The rings are almost a normal present but when it’s that many you’re just Sauron.
Edit: fixed math
I think whoever wrote the song was just hungry.
- From days 8 to 12 your true love gives you milkmaids, dancing ladies, leaping lords, pipers and drummers. Human beings. As gifts. Which makes eating the birds feel a lot more okay.
- This carol was written back when Christmas was a mere 12 days long. Now Christmas starts in mid-October. “On the ninety-ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, ninety-nine wall beers…”
At least you can eat the geese. What the heck am I going to do with turtledoves and partridges?
People used to routinely eat just about every bird there was. The only reason nobody bothers with songbirds is that they’re too small to be worth a damn. Remember the passenger pigeon? The extinct one. Yeah we literally ate that into extinction.
Fair enough. Although I don’t think you’d need to bother with the songbirds in this instance seeing as you’ve been gifted a years worth of geese, French hens, and milk. Unless you’re required to feed all the other various humans you’ve been gifted as well. I guess then it would be time to crack into the turtledoves.
What about the French hens? Those seem like the likely nom nom candidate.
I’ve eaten partridge before. It’s not bad. Not sure I’d eat turtledove if I had other options.
This is quality shit.
