The 11th Day of Christmas - January 4th
From the song, we have the 11 Pipers piping...
A couple meanings could be behind this according to legend. During the 16th through 19th centuries, it was illegal for Catholics to practice their faith in England - so the story goes (may not be true) that the faithful Catholics developed coded meaning in the song, the Twelve Days of Christmas, to publicly sing of their faith without drawing attention to it. One possible meaning is the 11 represents 11,000 - or a lot - of martyrs for the Catholic Faith in England. Another and more popular belief is that the 11 represents the 11 Apostles who remained faithful to Christ through the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
I say "legend" because there is no real hard evidence prior to the 1990s where this "legend" seems to have begun. Certainly, the song is from the 16th-17th century, but that there are coded meaings behind each verse - well, again, there is just no evidence for this prior to several email chains from the 1990s. That said, I see nothing wrong with attributing these meanings to the verses, but we should be clear about the origins of these meanings.
Catholic Saints for January 4th:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep in mind while posting:
1) Please respond ON TOPIC to the article at hand.
2) Posts more than 4 weeks old are set to automatically save new comments for moderation - so your comment may not show up immediately if you're responding to an older post.
3) The "Spam Filter" is on - and randomly messages get caught in that filter. I have no control over which messages get caught in the spam filter and those that do must wait for me to mark them as "not spam." A message caught by the spam filter may show up for a moment, making you think it posted, and then disappear. Do not assume I have deleted your comment, it's probably just the spam filter and it will show up.