The Twelve Days of Christmas (song) the Faroe Islands, there is a comparable counting Christmas song. The gifts include: one feather, two geese, three sides of meat, four sheep, five cows, six oxen, seven dishes, eight ponies, nine banners, ten barrels, eleven goats, twelve men, thirteen hides, fourteen rounds of cheese and fifteen deer. These were illustrated in 1994 by local cartoonist Óli Petersen (born 1936) on a series of two stamps issued by the Faroese Philatelic Office. "Les Douze Mois" ("The Twelve Months") (also known as "La Perdriole"—"The Partridge") is another similar cumulative verse from France that has been likened to "The Twelve Days of
The Twelve Days of Christmas (song) and so would hardly need to be secretly encoded. The now-standard melody for the carol was published in 1909 by Novello & Co.. English composer Frederic Austin fitted the words to a traditional melody, to which he added his own two-bar motif for "Five gold rings". Many of the decisions Austin made with regard to the lyrics subsequently became widespread: The time signature of this song is not constant, unlike most popular music. This irregular meter perhaps reflects the song's folk origin. The introductory lines, such as "On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me", are