These fanciful depictions of The Twelve Days of Christmas came from
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Have you ever wondered about the significance of the various verses in the song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas"? Click here to read a fascinating article on Snopes.com.
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Hm-m, I'm at a loss to know what to blog about now that the pre-holiday madness has come to a screeching halt in this household......KA-BOOM.....CRASH.......colliding with the between-Christmas-and-New Year's malaise.
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Last night when I clicked "publish" there was a blurb from Blogger about ways to help your blog load faster. You can go to this "Stopwatch" site and paste in your URL to find out how long it takes your blog to load. The article mentioned that having nonBlogger.com gadgets and widgets that run on HTML/JavaScript make blogs load slower; the advice was to put these types of things near the bottom of your blog page or sidebar, or get rid of them. You probably know about this already.......see, I'm grasping at straws to figure out what to blog about today........tomorrow.......and, the next day........
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Please, inform me if my blog loads annoyingly slow for you, and, be honest! I can take it.......what I can't take is people being dishonest with me. My blog page comes up fairly speedily on my own computer, but I do have a supposedly fast DSL internet connection.
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Most likely, I will not make the trip to Toeterville today; as I write this on Friday, the forecast for Saturday (today) is freezing rain turning to snow. Yuck! Enjoy your day!
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[P.S. - The weather is gray and not fit for travel. My daughter and son-in-law and their big yellow Lab, Izzy, will probably stay for another day. In between fixing food, refereeing encounters between Izzy and the cats, washing mugs, and socializing with the kids, I sneak into the computer room to surf my blog list and will mention a few here:
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Kate of Chronicles of a Country Girl celebrated her 1-year blog anniversary yesterday and is doing a giveway of one of her beautiful photos......go leave a comment to be in the drawing.
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Gail of At the Farm has a really cute post which aptly describes the blogging addiction. I can wholeheartedly identify with it!
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Ruth of Ruth's Visions and Revisions offers an excellent review of a movie I'd not heard of before, and might never have if not for Ruth's post.
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Blogger rhymeswithplague is a very good writer, and his posts always exhibit that gift.
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Laura of Silence is Broken is a blogger-extraordinaire.......prolific and always interesting.
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Go visit Deserthen's blog, Gravel Roads & Daiquiris in the Dirt to see some fabulous winter scenes from her area of Nevada.
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Drop in on Nancy at SewManyDays blog from Minnesota........let's surprise her with lots of comments today!
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If you have time for some seriously good travelogue reading, check out Reamus' blog.
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Judy lives on a dairy farm in British Columbia and is gifted in creating beautiful posts on her blog, My Front Porch.
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Rose at Pics & Pieces had a cat-dilemma tale to tell.]
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10 comments:
I did not know the history of the song...Thank you.
Fascinating! I'll have to check in with Snopes.com more often. Particularly interestering was the fact buried way down in the article about "colly" (or "coaly", I suspect) birds being blackbirds and five golden rings being ring-necked pheasants!
One is never to old to learn....
i have cable and unless something is happening with it everyones loads fast...even when you have nothing to blog about you have great posts... so pat you on the back :) another well done post!
Hugs Laura
I have no trouble loading your blog at any time. So, widget away!
Hi, Gail,
I think we're getting Arkansas weather today....its RAINING and is much warmer, but is making a mess with all the melting snow!
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Hi, Rhymsie,
Yes.....I was intrigued, too, by the "colly"/calling birds information. I didn't find it "interestering", though, as you did! Hahaha......finally caught you in misspelling......maybe you did it intentionally!!
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Hi, Laura,
OK....good, you have a fast connection. Thank you for the info and for the kind words!
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Hi, Pat,
Good, good.....another fast connection! Have a great day!
Great photos of the twelve days.....I did not know the history either. You always come up with great things to blog about! I love coming here to learn new things.....=D Keep it up!! Your blog loads pretty darn fast on my computer at home and really fast on my computer at work...that is the difference between out in the country connection and in town connection...he, he. Have a wonderful weekend, stay safe and warm. We are going sledding later today....haven't done that in years!!
Jeannelle, I don't have difficulties very much even with dial-up. My google reader tends to download the pics fast and they just transfer over when I bring up the site. Lovely little 12 day pics. I'm a bit at odds about what to blog about these days as well. LOL.
The rain is sure welcome here, it's melting the snow and we can get out!
Thanks for mentioning, or maybe that should be mentionering, my blog in your post. I am grateful for every last reader I get!
I enjoyed the 12 days of Christmas links.
Thanks for the link.
Your blog has slowed down slightly since you added the new backgrounds, but it's not what I call slow.
Found this on Pip Wilson's almanac site:
"In recent years, for reasons your almanackist has not yet been able to discover, some audio recordings from the USA have begun using the term 'calling birds' in this line of the old Christmas carol , 'The Twelve Days of Christmas', which was already old when first committed to paper in 1780 – rather than the familiar 'colly birds', ie blackbirds (birds the the colour of coal*) – while in most of the English-speaking world the traditional term from the ancient song seems still to be generally sung as shown above, and I hazard a guess that it was also sung the original way in older USA recordings. Any information on precisely when this change first occurred in the USA would be of interest to your almanackist.
One also wonders whether the rising influence of commercially recorded music, and the unfortunate recent decline of people actually singing amongst themselves, singing children to sleep, or carolling from house to house, will see outside of the USA a general shift towards the American version of the original lyrics. What a 'calling bird' is, is also something unknown to your almanackist. Perhaps it is a USA term describing a bird with which I'm unfamiliar. Almaniacs are invited to share any knowledge they might have. The matter is to find the lyrics (perhaps on sheet music) of the first audio recording with the change, or perhaps some fairly recent book transcribed the words incorrectly. This is how folklore changes.....
*'Colly' is an English dialect word meaning 'black' (like coal) and refers to the European blackbird, Turdus merula.
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