As I type these words to you the calendar page has flipped for the final time in 2023. It is December now. For some of you, today will just be a day like any other. But as a former teacher, I can tell you for a fact that the day the calendar page changed from November to December held great meaning for the little children under my care. Even though only twenty-four hours had elapsed since it was November 30th, the dawning of December had the effect of pulling back the curtain on a world of grand possibilities. For most of the students that I had the pleasure to teach, December meant that Christmas was really happening soon. For the handful of Jewish students I was fortunate enough to teach, December signaled the imminent arrival of Hanukkah. I never taught anyone whose family celebrated Kwanzaa, but I imagine that the sudden appearance of December was a time of great excitement and anticipation for them as well. Whatever the case, whoever the child, the first day of December meant that the holiday season had truly begun. In the land of the tiny children where I got to hang out as their teacher there was no happier time of the year.
While the month of December contained within it a large amount of fun for my students, it still was a time of learning and of personal growth. One of the key tasks assigned to me was to help my students understand the many traditions and rituals that mark the holiday season. One of the areas of study we engaged in was understanding the meaning behind some of the common carols that are sung at this time of the year. While many of our classic carols have something to do with telling part of the story of the birth of the Baby Jesus, many others do not. One example of this is the Christmas song entitled “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. I know that whenever we gathered as a class or as a school community to sing together in December, the announcement that the next song was going to be “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was usually met with a chorus of groans. The reason for that reaction was that this carol is a lengthy song that has a repetitive structure to how it was written. It was all fun and games until we would get to the fifth day of Christmas and those five golden rings but after that, who knew if it was dancing ladies or drummers or geese or what the final gift was on the twelfth day…just please let this song be over. Perhaps if we had really stuck to tradition, we would have enjoyed the experience that much more.
“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is a song whose exact origin is unknown. What is known is that the first iterations of the version we know today were recorded in the 1700s. There is some debate, based upon the nature of the gifts given on each day, whether the song is of English or French origin. But what isn’t under debate is the way in which this song was intended to be sung, which was as something called a forfeit game. A forfeit game was a memory challenge that required each participant to memorize and recite back an increasingly lengthy series of pieces of information. Failure to do so correctly would result in that person having to forfeit, or give up, something such as a piece of candy or even a kiss to the other participants in the game. This explains why the song is structured as a continuously expanding set of gifts to remember with each subsequent verse.
In addition, it is generally agreed that the reason that the song covers twelve days harkens back to a time when Christmas celebrations began on the 25th of December (honouring the birth of the Baby Jesus), continuing on until January 5th (the day before Epiphany which, according to the Bible, is the day The Three Wise Men or Magi reached the stable and found the newborn babe and realized that the Baby Jesus was actually God incarnate).
As for the nature of the gifts themselves, no one can say for sure what the original twelve gifts were because the origin of the song is unclear. Some believe that the gifts were meant to reflect the twelve months of the year and to celebrate what was going on in each month. Because much of Europe existed as agrarian societies hundreds of years ago, it is no wonder that the gifts given during “The Twelve Days of Christmas” would feature food, farm animals and farm-related chores such as maids a-milking. However, one thing that music scholars do agree upon is that the structural format of this song was well-suited to being altered to suit the particular region one found oneself in. Consequently, people in southern France would have different birds present than someone else might from northern England. This is also true if the singers in question came from the Great White North which, of course, is Canada.
In 1981, there was a comedy show on Canadian television simply called SCTV. The show starred comedians Eugene Levy, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Catherine O’ Hara, Andrea Martin, Martin Short and Joe Flaherty. When the show first started, these comedians were not the big stars that they have become over time. Initially, they were all comedians who had graduated together from the ranks of a comedy improv. factory known as Second City, hence the “SC” in SCTV. Some of their peers, such as Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner, took their talents south into the United States and helped launch the show Saturday Night Live. SCTV first aired in Canada at a time when the federal government had introduced Canadian content legislation. This legislation mandated that all broadcasters in Canada were required, as a condition of maintaining their broadcasting licence, to air a certain percentage of programming that featured Canadian content, that showcased Canadian actors *(except for Flaherty and Martin), that was filmed in Canadian studios or locations by Canadian crews and so on and so forth. The idea behind the legislation was to help prop up the fledgling Canadian broadcasting industry at a time when it was being overwhelmed by broadcasters from south of the border. Some people saw cancon rules, as they came to be known, as being helpful. However, other people saw these rules as being an admission that Canadian talent wasn’t good enough to produce work worth watching. SCTV was created in response to all of this.
The format of SCTV was that the show itself was a television station and that all of the skits were shows that aired throughout the day on that station. The characters who would become household names soon enough were meant to act as the stars of these “shows” or else as advertisers or as television/studio executives. But even though SCTV was a Canadian show that used Canadian actors and film crews, government overseers felt that there wasn’t enough content on the show that actually reflected Canadian culture. In a case of art imitating life, the producers of SCTV were ordered to create new “shows” for the SCTV lineup that were undeniably Canadian in content and appearance. The stars of SCTV couldn’t believe how far they were being pushed by government agents, so they decided among themselves to give these folks exactly what they wished for in the form of a new show called The Great White North starring two brothers known as Bob and Doug McKenzie. This skit or “show” was designed to look like a talk/variety show. However, as much as it presented itself as celebrating Canadian culture, it mocked it even more. Every stereotype one can think of with regards to how the world saw Canada from afar was incorporated into each two-minute segment. First of all, the title of the show…The Great White North…played upon the worldview that Canada was snowbound from coast to coast to coast. The characters of Bob and Doug McKenzie (played by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) always wore toques, fried back bacon and drank beer from stubby brown bottles as they talked, always peppering their improvised conversations with phrases like “eh?” and “take off!” and “hoser”. These Great White North segments were always filmed at the end of the work day. Moranis and Thomas and one cameraman would go off to a corner of their studio and would actually drink real beer and fry real bacon, all the while improvising their way through two minutes of dialogue about “today’s topic”, whatever that happened to be. They would record fifteen to twenty episodes in one sitting and then select the best dozen or so to appear on air. What started out as a lark by the cast ended up becoming the most popular segment on SCTV. In time, Bob and Doug McKenzie became the first characters to outgrow the show. Their characters were used as the basis for a movie called Strange Brew. They also recorded a comedy album called The Great White North that was nominated for a Grammy Award in the comedy category. This album included two songs that actually charted on the Top 40 rock charts. One of the songs that charted was called “Take Off!”, which featured Geddy Lee from Rush singing the chorus. The other song that charted was their version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. Needless to say, the original Christmas version of the song was adapted to reflect the world of Bob and Doug McKenzie and the Canadian values that they mocked/espoused. This was made clear right from the very beginning of the song when Bob McKenzie (Moranis) sings “On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me…a beer!” at which time he would lovingly hold a brown stubby aloft.
While Saturday Night Live had some very memorable moments and characters, that show also went through periods when much of its content was cringeworthy and completely lacking in humour. In contrast, there are many who compare SCTV favourably by stating that the show was consistently excellent over time. Eventually, Canadian content rules became less of a factor on network television, as well as in the world of music. The Canadian Arts community has grown strong and now stands proudly with artists from any country around the world. But in the early 1980s, that was not necessarily the case. As a result, with the “help” of the Canadian government and the improvisational genius of Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, we have one of the world’s most memorable cover versions of the Christmas classic “The Twelve Days of Christmas”.
This brings me back to my classroom days. Perhaps having to sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with small wiggly children all giddy with excitement for the arrival of Santa wouldn’t have been such a chore if we had used the forfeit game format? If I had the chance to do it all again, perhaps I would give that a try. However, I don’t know how well-received Bob and Doug McKenzie’s version would be with parents. Can you imagine one of my families sitting around the supper table, mom and/or dad asking their child how their school day went and the child responding that they learned a new song that involved having a beer! On my! I am certain that I would get letters and that they wouldn’t necessarily be ones that were wishing me a Merry Christmas and all the best in the new year, either! But secretly, I know some parents would actually be smiling as they remembered the song and replayed it in their minds. After all, you can still protect the innocence of your children without acting like a complete hoser! Take off, eh!
The link to the video for the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” by Bob and Doug McKenzie can be found here. ***The lyrics version can be found here. Note: the lyrics version video has the lyrics but not the tune of the song. If I were you, I would open two tabs. Play the original video on one and the lyrics video on the other. Sorry. There seems to not be an official lyrics video for this song.
The link to the official YouTube channel for SCTV can be found here.
The link to the video for the trailer to the movie Strange Brew can be found here.
The link to the video for the song “Take off!” by Bob and Doug McKenzie (and Geddy Lee) can be found here. ***There is no lyrics version.
The link to the video for the traditional rendition of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.
***As always, all original content contained within this post remains the sole property of the author. No portion of this post shall be reblogged, copied or shared in any manner without the express written consent of the author. ©2023 http://www.tommacinneswriter.com
Pure Canadiana 🇨🇦
This brings back a couple of different memories. The first was the hilarity of watching our kids mimicking the Bob and Doug McKenzie skits.
The second is, as you say, cringeworthy. I remember the time I was reading the book, “ TWELVE DOGS OF CHRISTMAS” with your class and having them interact with the song. It was clearly too long and repetitive to hold their interest at that age. But, for some reason, I felt we had to complete the activity….😱what was I thinking? That was one of lessons I would like to go back I. Time and change😢
You read more than a few good books back in the day if I recall. TWELVE DOGS is a tough one with small kids, though. You live and you learn. I even get tired of Bob and Doug’s version after a while.