In tune with the season, and that traditional English Christmas song, over the next couple weeks I (and your true love) will bring to you musical gift suggestions for the 12 days of Christmas — which, FYI, start on the holiday itself and end on Jan. 6, the Feast of the Epiphany.
We will bring you the presents in four batches, starting today; like Brown and USPS, we don’t deliver on holidays. So, you can rattle the box, but Do Not Open till Christmas!.
Unlike the traditional song, this won’t be cumulative — you won’t be getting a partridge and a pear tree all 12 days. All the geese and hens and swans would get pretty messy — not to mention if the maids a-milking brought their cows. Worse yet, all those Partridge Family LPs?
A Partridge in a Pear Tree
On the First Day of Christmas, if you’re unlucky, your true love will bring you “I Think I Love You” (why is he/she unsure?) by the Partridge Family. If he or she also brings you one or more of their eight (seriously?) studio albums, with or without the pear tree, it may be a sign that your relationship is doomed. And if David Cassidy shows up at the door, “Run away!”
As for the pear tree, don’t know where he or she will get that. You might be able to substitute a “Lemon Tree” — very pretty, I’m told — by Peter, Paul and Mary, or that banana tree Arthur Lyman’s “Yellow Bird” was up in, back in 1961. (And hang onto the bird for a couple days.) You could get the pear from Little Feat’s “Cold, Cold, Cold” (appropriate to the season, too): “Give me a peach, or a pear, or a coconut please.”
Two Turtle Doves
On the Second Day, he or she could try to mail it in, and bring you Howard Kaylen and Mark Volman, or albums by them or the group they helped found.
But they would be wrong. Turtle doves are birds, of the genus streptopelia, not shelled amphibians, Phlorescent Leeches or Eddies, or 60s rock bands. They’re not white, either, so you’ll have to settle for “Wings of a Dove,” either by Dolly Parton or Marty Robbins, or “On the Edge of 17” by Stevie Nicks (perhaps from her fine collection, “Stevie Mumbles Her Greatest Hits”?).