Twelve Days of Christmas

The Xmas silly season seems to come earlier and earlier to our shopping malls.  Orchard Road's lights have been lit up to celebrate a festival that is still a good month away and the local malls in New Zealand are already trotting out their Xmas specials.

Even if you don't subscribe to the religious overtones of the celebration, there is something vaguely obscene about being so blatantly commercial, so early.

The traditional twelve days of Xmas seems to have become the 'twelve months of Xmas'.

Xmas Santa - Rural South Australia
Photo: Roger Smith

In fact, the twelve days of Xmas commence on Christmas Day and conclude on the eve of January 5th. - the origins of the song coming from France rather than Britain.

Mind you in Singapore the erection of Xmas decorations is reasonably uneventful whereas this year in Auckland we have witnessed a rather spectacular helicopter crash that occurred when a large artificial tree was being constructed in the Viaduct Basin.




The pre-Xmas advertising in NZ has been somewhat overshadowed by the General Election which reaches its climax this Saturday.  Whatever the outcome there will not be too many 'stocking fillers' to lighten the economic gloom ahead.

A partridge in a pear tree might be all that we get.

Related articles

• Orchard Road on a Thursday Night (hasayang.wordpress.com)