Amy Lu's View

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me…a blog post?!

That’s right, just in time for the holidays, a new Amy Blogging Challenge: The Twelve Blog Days of Christmas.

No, this challenge is not going to involve a post for every item in that traditional Christmas carol. Those gifts (strange and bizarre and totally impractical, in my hardly cutting-edge opinion) may provide some inspiration and make an appearance, but they will not be the focus. My only real rule is that I need to write twelve blog posts in a row (starting with today) that somehow have to do with Christmas.

I am aware that the actual Twelve Days of Christmas start on Christmas Day and run through Epiphany–January 6–so my Twelve Days are not going to exactly line up with their namesake. (At least I think this is the deal. A quick perusal of Wikipedia did not provide confirmation or refutation so I’m going to stick with my understanding).

And this Twelve Blog Days of Christmas Challenge does NOT supersede or cancel or in any way threaten my completion of my still-in-process 15 Days of Frog and Toad Blog Challenge. The Frog and Toad challenge is not consecutive so the Christmas challenge won’t interrupt it. Furthermore, unlike races, I’ve decided that a blog post can fill two challenges and there is a Frog and Toad story about Christmas Eve so expect an upcoming multipurpose blog post.

I did briefly toy with somehow more thoroughly addressing the Twelve Days of Christmas carol in this challenge’s inaugural post, but another cursory attempt at Wikipedia research wore me out–it’s too hard for a casual blogger to learn what the gifts are actually referring to.

As a child of the 80’s, it’s more meaningful–at least nostalgically–to me to research Bob and Doug MacKenzie’s 1982 spoof of the song. And hey, that song expanded my cultural literacy of Canada and taught me about backbacon. I would definitely rather recieve the gifts that Bob and Doug sing about–at least they are mostly consumable (beer, backbackon, french toast) or practical (who couldn’t use another turtleneck, at least those of us in the norther climes?)

And I JUST learned (or re-learned, maybe I knew this at some point but forgot) that they are saying “Five golden toques” and that a “toque” is a hat. I think I always thought they were saying “toke”–as in a hit on a joint.

If I was more ambitious, I would come up with my ideal “Twelve Gifts.” Without giving it too much thought (because it feels like it would involve math) I would want to stick with mostly consumables, with highlights including Triscuits, cheese, coffee, tea, wine and culminating with bourbon. (I can’t think of anything clever to substitute for Five Gold/en Rings/Toques).

Honestly, “The Twelve Days” carol just doesn’t do a lot for me–unless it is the version from the album “John Denver and the Muppets.”