Merry Christmas to the UK
Merry Christmas to everyone in the UK!
Make sure to follow along with our NORAD Santa tracker blog to follow Santa’s Christmas route.
Heading for England
After flying through Porto, Portugal, Santa is now heading to Southampton, England.
Santa has already delivered over four billion gifts!
The lyrics to 12 Days of Christmas
The popular song starts with the opening lyrics: “On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: a Partridge in a Pear Tree.”
Those two lines are then repeated but with a different day and item each time it is sung.
So the second repetition goes as follows: “On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Two Turtle Doves and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.”
The third time it is sung, it would be: “On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Three French Hens, Two Turtle Doves, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.”
This continues until the song has gone all the way up to the twelfth – and final – day of Christmas with the below lyrics:
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me:
12 Drummers Drumming
11 Pipers Piping
Ten Lords a Leaping
Nine Ladies Dancing
Eight Maids a Milking
Seven Swans a Swimming
Six Geese a Laying
Five Golden Rings
Four Calling Birds
Three French Hens
Two Turtle Doves
and a Partridge in a Pear Tree
Breaking down the 12 days of Christmas
The 12 days of Christmas, also known as Twelvetide, is a Christian festive celebration of the Nativity of Jesus Christ.
Twelvetide starts on Christmas Day on December 25.
As it states, it lasts for 12 days and runs until January 5.
The reason Christmas is called Xmas
It turns out we’ve got the Greeks to thank for that.
As we mentioned earlier, the word Khrīstos (the origin of the word Christ) appears as “Χριστός” when written in Greek.
The abbreviation Xmas is based on the first letter – chi, which appears as X – followed by “mas”; a shortened version of Mass.
There is an alternative theory that the use of Xmas stems from an attempt by some to remove the religious tradition from Christmas by removing the word Christ, but its use dates all the way back to the 16th century.
The history of Christmas, continued
Interestingly, early Christians actively rejected the celebration of Christ’s birth as they saw birthdays as a pagan ritual, followed in the bible by figures like the Pharaoh.
Easter and Pentecost (celebrated seven weeks after Easter to mark the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and other followers of Jesus Christ) were the main occasions in the Christian calendar for ecclesiastical feasts until midway through the fourth century, when Christmas and Epiphany were added to the calendar.
December 25 was then established as the Nativity Feast Day (not necessarily the day Jesus was born – but that’s another story) and the official ‘Nativity Mass’ was the first Mass of the day, held at 9 am.
As time passed, the celebration of Christmas became more popular – and so too did the liturgical practices that went with it.
Christmas Mass became a central fixture in the church calendar, which led to the day becoming known as Christ’s Mass by the 11th century.
