this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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Only if you assume that everything on the list was additive to the initial gifts every time. I think you can infer from the context of the song, the holiday, how gift-giving works, etc. that they were just appending to the list of gifts each day.
But those are the sort of things that LLMs are incapable of doing.
That's what the lyrics say though.
On the X day of Christmas my true love gave to me, X [item], X-1 [item], etc.
The song explicitly states they give this stuff every day.
I’ve always taken it as they’re tabulating the gifts:
“Wow, today he gave me three french hens! Plus I have the two turtle doves from yesterday and the partridge in a pear tree from Christmas day!”
Only if you take it literally and I don't think it was intended to be taken that way.
All songs should be taken literally, which is why I eat love and prayers, and have a restraining order against me for trying to drag Hozier into a church at knifepoint.
Either interpretation is valid, though. Either one is an absurd amount of gifts, I would not put it past the gifter to have made an extravagant display of re-giving the stuff from days before each day.
I’d be interested if this sort of exaggeration humor was common in Victorian England. Giving them all those things each day has a very “Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory” vibe that would be very amusing after a wassail or two.
"on the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree."
It takes a bit of mental gymnastics to assert that on the second day of Christmas he did not send two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.
If I said yesterday I gave my friend a pork pie and today I gave my friend some spaghetti and a pork pie, you would not come to the conclusion that my friend did not receive a second pork pie.
I'd say it depends on whether you were singing it to me or not. Songs kind of have to keep these things brief a lot of the time. Also, the lyrics of this song don't make much sense to begin with. 🤷
I’ve never assumed that interpretation. I always thought the gifts were given each day. So you end up with twelve partridges and pear trees at the end. The song says “on the nth day of christmas my true love gave to me” doesn’t that imply you are receiving all those gifts that day?
I guess this also illustrates a problem. Maybe it should at least say the song has been interpreted in more than one way before doing its count.
This 1955 featurette interpreted it as re-gifting daily. It ends up being a LOT of birds.