I grew up in a home that celebrates Christmas and always decorates with our handmade Christmas bits and baubles. My early Christmases were spent mostly indoors preparing for events that, for very many years, made church feel like home. Every year, I was surrounded by warm lighting, friends, and Christmas wreaths in different iterations, flower arrangements and songs in musicals that would make me feel like for a month out of the year, I had somewhere I belonged. It is with mostly fondness that I remember the carols we sang and learnt, and the ones playing over my father’s speakers at home when I was young. I don’t go to church anymore, and Christian music feels different and distorted to me now because of where I’m at with the religion and its communal format in Singapore, but Christmas Carols? For me, these older pieces of music shimmer around the edges with some sort of wonder, reflexive and familiar with the sheen and gloss of a time when I was younger and less aware of myself.

The earliest carols existed in 4th century Rome, and they were mostly serious statements of theological doctrine. I would think of them more as sacred text and music — another genre I have complex, compelling ties to, thanks to a great many (anxious) years in school choirs and then later in an adult choir. Today, many carols as we know them are not the sombre, sacred texts they used to be. They vary enough to cover a wide range of music: stately, lighthearted, lovelorn, celebratory; most of them share the quality of being heart-warming. Many are filled with the sounds of bells chiming and musical chords we might have come to associate with images of Christmas trees and hearty feasts on the table. I read once a post on tumblr about how and why the most iconic Christmas Carols evoke an almost pavlovian response in most of us that signal that year-end, festive air — it’s all in the opening chords and motifs. Christmas may be marked by monsoon and not snow here, but we definitely don’t miss out on that sparkle.

My personal favourite part of the history of carols is this: if we locate where carols were in around the 1200s, we will find them fulfilling the oral tradition’s purpose of tale-bearing. That is, many figures of religious authority and believers would pass on the story of the Nativity, or other significant theological events, precisely through lyrical poetry or song. Pick out an older, iconic carol and its weighted beat and chords, the motifs that carry the footsteps of its origin — something about that old music and poetry always feels like myth to me. Fascinating in the way the universal tales thread through text, shifting slightly so that it’s all a little like a liquid, iridescent sheet — turned this way and that the colour changes in the light, but never enough for you to be sure which version you’re seeing is the correct one. And for me, that’s always been something like magic. What I guess I’m saying is: so much about music and its stories are simultaneously available and opaque to me — the stories I know and yet don’t. Telling stories — that is an act of love.

(I will come to realise this is much like food recipes and flavour profiles, like the way my aunt cooks or bakes and the way, no matter how much I stand by the stove and write down her recipes, there’s something in the flavour of a homemade chinese stew made from scratch that I will never be able to recreate for myself. There are just some parts of the story that will always get lost, and parts of the story we have to fill in ourselves, with the squishy bits of our own heart. This too is an act of love.)

There are a select few carols we all know. Growing up with the tradition of carolling in the Christmas seasons means I’ve found that some carols have been around so long that you develop some sort of reflexive fondness for them. For me, The 12 Days of Christmas is one of those. It sits in my head and loops sometimes when the season comes, constant like a comfortable, warm-toned armchair that sits in the corner of the living room. It might be a little lumpy, and I might sometimes wonder why we’ve kept it around, but returning to it and rediscovering it’s weird little grooves always fills me with a sort of reluctant affection.

Some history: The 12 Days of Christmas was first written in the 1780s, and originally not set to a tune. Its merry, looping lyrics are just as much peculiar as they are familiar to me, especially in our context today. There is a long-withstanding rumour that the song is intensely metaphorical, and actually a method taught to Catholic children to help them with remembering theological facts. In this story, the sets of birds represent Jesus Christ himself, the Old and New Testaments, the three gifts from the three wise men (gold, frankincense, and myrrh), amongst others. It follows, then, that the one true love in this interpretation is the Christian God.

Many have since debunked this theory, arguing that there is no real, stable comparison between the different gift sets and their theological counterparts. What intrigues me, though, is that this line of argument forgets this: we create our own stories, and our own metaphors, and the connections between them and our immediate world are made by us and passed on from person to person until they become common and established; well-worn and used in a way that lets us pass over the language often without searching. It’s not so much that we need a definite, stable way of reading and interpreting stories — but that we create them anyway, and that our stories change from there, and us with them.

As for the more secular origins of The Twelve Days of Christmas: it was first seen in a children’s book entitled Mirth Without Mischief. Primarily because of this, the commonly accepted non-religious theory is that it used to be used for a game of forfeit for young ones. Children would sit in a circle and recite the verses, each next player adding on with the next line, and the child who got the lyrics wrong would have to offer up a forfeit in the form of a kiss or a favour. When I dug further, I found that early versions of the game and manners of performance were speculated upon by storytellers in their fiction, across an extended timeframe.

That they did so was not a planned affair — no one dug up this carol and decided to do academic research on it. The allure of folk tales is difficult to resist, however, and I personally think that the idea of this carol as a game or some sort of handed down tradition carries a folkloric quality. Joseph Bruchac writes about the oral tradition in The Guardian, “Unlike the insect frozen in amber, a told story is alive. It always changes from one telling to the next depending on the voice and mood of the storyteller, the place of its telling, the response of the audience. The story breathes with the teller’s breath.”

I keep returning to this idea of stories and the tales we tell ourselves because I think it is important to see that we hand down the narratives that we know, through singing or just recitation (or, now, gossip or news), and with them we pass on our truths and the things we believe. They are woven through our words and colour the way we pitch our voices, even over static text. Of course some of these nuances get lost, but if we become conscious of the ways we tell stories, then we learn to do so maybe in kinder and more generous ways. If we know our rituals and recognise them for what they are, then maybe we can tug at the seams to make space for the slightly less tangible, more forgiving, the little slips in stories that make us human.

It was in 1909 that a man named Frederic Austin set the text to music, adding little flourishes that are iconic today. It was he who, for example, extended “five gold rings” into “five gold-en rings” so as to fill each musical note with a discrete syllable. From here, the little ditty grew and was performed so many times that it stands today as one of the most common Christmas carols we know of. We’ve heard it so many times now that the lyrics pass over us almost like white noise — how many times have I played a game of Don’t Forget The Lyrics with this very song, only to find I can’t for the life of me remember what comes after “8 maids a-milking”?

The point is not that we read the lyrics and obsessively theorise about what they refer to, or try to decode the cultural significances behind it. The point is not to ignore it completely either. We find the truths that we find acceptable or right and grow them into our understandings of the world. If it suits one to try to match each line of The 12 Days of Christmas to an item of symbolic, religious, or cultural significance, there is plenty of room for that. Still more stories exist around this carol, tongue-in-cheek and otherwise: the Christmas Price Index, where we satirically measure inflation rates through calculating the total cost of these 12 sets of gifts; the linguistic speculations surrounding its lyrics and how they might have come to be…

I grew up with this carol. I found it annoying and endearing in turns. I searched many times for its lyrics, trying to approximate their meaning with my own lived context: what would these gifts be if I had to replace them? In the end, though, it is not entirely what this carol does or doesn’t mean, but the ways it has been sung, read, and understood over the years that will give us a glimpse of how we might understand past worlds and the stories they tell.