“On the First Day
of Christmas
My True Love Sent
to Me …
A Clever Greek
Turned Into a Bird”
Elise Kannan wrapped a scarf around her
neck, the tight loops of cashmere yarn rubbing softly beneath her chin. The air
she breathed into her lungs was cold and damp and smelled a bit of exhaust, but
she would hardly expect anything different. She lived in London, after all. And
it was December. There were no blooming things to perfume the cold, wet air,
but bright red bows blossomed from Christmas wreaths, and tiny, white lights
decorated storefronts and street lamps like handfuls of shiny sequins.
She hailed a taxi and climbed in, pulling
her travel case beside her. “Heathrow, please,” she instructed the driver as
the little black car moved back into the flow of traffic. She’d taken this
journey more times than she could count, most often for work. She was a
historian and spent most of her time inside the British Museum where she was both
curator and student. This trip was also an exploratory one; aimed at gaining
knowledge after much reading and researching and studying. It wasn’t
necessarily for the nine to five job, however. She shook her head and smirked.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d clocked in at nine, or left the
office by five. She’d seen less of her flat in the last seven years and more
of the museum. Weekends off were scarce. Her refrigerator held few perishable
items, but her collection of take out menus was impressive.
This was a personal trip, more for pleasure
than business, but she still meant to learn something. It was the holiday
season, and her journey had everything to do with Christmas. Well, a Christmas
song, anyway. It had all come up as a joke one night between her and
Freddie, a long time friend whom she enjoyed dinner with once a week at the pub near her place. It
was at the tail end of November and he was complaining about the Christmas
program he was beginning to organize for his students.
“It’s always the same, isn’t it?” he
groused. “’The First Noel’, of course, and ‘Away in a Manger’.”
“And don’t forget ‘I Saw Three Ships’,”
Elise reminded him.
“Oh, yes.” And with that he finished his
pint. “And that bloody ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’. That one goes on for an
eternity.”
Elise shook her head. “That’s quite a
lovely song. One of my favorites.”
He blew a yeasty smelling gust of air in
her direction. “Really?” He looked genuinely perplexed. “It’s hard enough
getting adults to remember the words to that one, let alone a bunch of children.
Ah, the first few days seem to stick in the brain from one year to the next,
but you get past the five golden rings and no one seems to know whether they’ve
got geese or pipers, and if they’re drumming or swimming.”
“Milking, maybe?” Elise laughed. “Or
leaping perhaps.”
Freddie cocked an eyebrow and studied her
with intense brown eyes. “You remember the whole bloody song, don’t you?” he
asked. When Elise blushed and shrugged her shoulders, he let out a raucous bit
of laughter. “You do! You little freak of nature, you.”
“If you tell anyone I’ll just deny it.”
“Anyone who knows you at all will know
you’re lying.”
Elise laughed, but a seed had been planted
in her inquisitive brain. She’d done some research later that evening, more
than any normal person would admit to, and found that the old Christmas carol
held more intrigue than she would have ever imagined.
The earliest known version of the lyrics
was published in 1780 under the title "The Twelve Days of Christmas sung
at King Pepin's Ball". It was in a children’s book called Mirth Without Mischief. She’d found a list of other versions—sixteen
in all—the last one written in 1966. That information was something else she’d
deny knowing if she was ever confronted. She wouldn’t be telling Freddie about
it, that’s for sure.
She used the lines in the song to help
build an itinerary, and the next morning she’d put in for three weeks’ vacation
time. Greece was her first stop. She was looking for a partridge in a pear tree,
and she was fairly certain she knew where to find it.
~~~~~~
The flight was a little over three hours
long, and Elise was ready to leave the plane the second it landed at Athens
International Airport. It had been awhile since she’d been in Greece, and,
although it wasn’t the warmest time of the year, mid-to late December was known
for balmier temperatures than London could boast. The sun was only out for a
few hours a day, but Elise still felt a great excitement about feeling the sand
between her toes.
Athens is one of the world’s oldest
cities. Elise had never traveled there during the holidays and was surprised to
discover how lively it was. The sidewalk cafés were loaded with people, and
there was an army of live musicians playing at nearly every dining
establishment in the city.
She ate bread dipped in sadziki, a mixture of yogurt, cucumber,
garlic and salt, then ordered some fried kalamari
with fresh lemon juice to enjoy before the main portion of her meal, the psito, was brought to the table. She ate
the leg of lamb slowly, savoring the flavor of the meat before enjoying the
roasted potatoes that garnished her plate. And then there was the wine. Elise
was so full after her huge meal that she walked very slowly back to her hotel
room while music continued to spill out of restaurant doors, and revelers on
holiday toasted one another at outdoor tables.
As Elise approached her room, she looked
up and saw the vague shape of the Acropolis rising nearly five hundred feet
above the sea. She shook her head and bid a quiet farewell to the ancient
citadel that looked down over the city.
“See you tomorrow,” she said as she
slipped inside and drifted off into a deep and easy sleep.
~~~~~~
The Acropolis was a stunning sight in the
light of day. As Elise walked past the Aglaureion,
she sipped from a cup of very strong coffee. She studied the shrine of Aglaurus,
who had been the daughter of Actaeus, king of Athens. She knew the story and
was fascinated by it. Aglaurus had been the product of an incestuous
relationship and was driven to suicide for ignoring a warning from the goddess
Athena. Elise perked up at the piece of remembered history, and she nearly
dropped her coffee when she tried to reach into her bag for a notebook and pen.
She stopped herself and took a deep breath as her eyes moved over the shrine.
It was only one of many ancient buildings of enormous architectural and
historical significance up here on the hill … and it was not the one that had
brought her to Athens in the first place. Elise knew she could get caught up in
it all if she wasn’t careful. Unfortunately, this next three weeks had been
carefully planned, and the time she had in this historic city was limited.
She took a deep breath and another
fortifying sip of coffee before moving on.
Elise spotted the Erechtheion, a temple that was dedicated to both Poseidon and
Athena, and the Pandroseion next to
that. This is where Athena had planted a sacred olive tree.
She continued to walk. There was the Arrephorion, a small building that had provided
the lodgings for the Arrephoros, or four
noble Athenian girls who worked to prepare the body-length garment that women
in ancient Greece wore. Elise racked her brain as she studied the building. The
Greek word for the garment suddenly popped into her head. Peplos. The sacred gown was used in the Panathenaic Games.
Elise moved through the courtyard and
found the staircase. She exited the Arrephorion
and found herself at the temple of Aphrodite. As entertaining as tales of the
goddess of love were, she was not who Elise had been looking for.
“Now we’re getting closer,” Elise said
quietly as she approached the Athena
Promachos, or rather where she had been decades before. For a thousand
years, the thirty-foot-tall bronze Athena stood and kept watch over her city,
but the statue had been destroyed in 1203 after being pulled down and carted off to
Constantinople.
Elise shook her head. She was getting
sidetracked again.
Athena was part of her “Twelve Days of
Christmas” crusade, but the biggest player in the tale she’d found and studied
was the hill upon which the Acropolis stood. That and an old Greek myth.
She walked around the old temple of Athena
and took in the sight of the Parthenon which rose tall behind it. There was so
much history here, so much mythical intrigue. She thought about a link she’d
found to this ancient place and the first day of Christmas as it was described
in the song. The link was tenuous at best, but still held enough to validity to
warrant the trip.
Daedalus was an artist and a skilled
craftsman. It is said that he created the Labyrinth on Crete, the one in which
the Minotaur was kept. Another story about Daedalus—probably the most well-known
story—was of his wings. Because he’d created the Labyrinth, and was the only
one who knew how to find his way through it, Daedalus was locked up in a tower
to prevent anyone from learning about the secrets of his Labyrinth. Minos, the
king, kept a careful eye on all vessels, only allowing them to sail once they’d
gone through a thorough search. This disallowed Daedalus to leave Crete by sea.
Because Minos made sure it wasn’t safe for Daedalus to travel by land, the
artist decided he and his young son, Icarus, would fly to their freedom.
Elise never learned exactly where the two
of them had found feathers while up in the tower, but it was written that he
tied a bunch of them together, starting with the smallest and moving toward the
largest, and secured them with wax. When he was finished, he’d crafted a set of
wings for both he and his son.
The craftsman then stood in the window of
his tower and waved his wings. He lifted from the sill and hung suspended in
the air. He warned Icarus not to fly too high. He was afraid that the heat of
the sun would melt the wax in his wings. He also told his son not to fly too
low because the foam from the sea would make the feathers wet.
Things were going well, and they’d flown
quite far when Icarus forgot what his father had told him. He began soaring
toward the sun and, as Daedalus had predicted, the wax began to soften. The
feathers began to fall off, sending Icarus plummeting into the sea where the
boy drowned.
This is where Athena came in.
After the death of Icarus, the goddess
visited Daedalus and gave him wings. She told him to fly like a god, and he was
able to escape Crete and the king.
As expected, Minos was unhappy about this.
He suspected that Daedalus had arrived safely in Sicily and went looking for
him there. He finally found him, using a spiral seashell, a string, some honey
and an ant. Elise shook her head as she remembered this part of the tale. It
was far-fetched, but it was mythology. That was part of the beauty of it.
Minos confronted Cocalus, the king of
Sicily, and demanded that he hand Daedalus over. Cocalus agreed, but urged Minos to take a
soothing bath before he confronted the wayward artist. He’d been traveling for
a long time and was tired and dirty. Minos agreed—and paid dearly for it. In
some versions of the story it is written that Cocalus’ daughters killed the
king of Crete. In others, it was Daedalus himself, who poured boiling hot water
over the man.
Elise turned and began walking back toward
the edge of the Acropolis. Greek myths were seldom short, and strands of each
story often reached out and wove themselves into other tales. What had happened
in Daedalus’ past became important to her task at hand when his sister gave
birth to a son named Perdix.
Daedalus had become so proud of himself.
He’d begun to think that he was so clever that he would never have a rival. When
Perdix showed a bit of ingenuity, his mother asked Daedalus if he might teach
the young boy a bit about the mechanical arts. He agreed, and was eager to show
the boy just how brilliant he was.
One day, while the two of them were
walking on the seashore, Perdix found the spine of a fish washed up on the
sand. He took a piece of iron and notched it on the edge and crafted a saw.
Later, he connected two pieces of iron and connected them at one end with a
rivet. After sharpening the other ends, he’d made a compass. His ingenuity
angered his uncle.
In a fit of jealous rage, Daedalus pushed
the young man over the edge of the Acropolis. Athena saw this and saved Perdix
by turning him into a partridge. She then gave Daedalus a scar on his shoulder in
shape of the bird and banished him from her city.
Elise looked down at the heart of Athens
sitting several hundreds of feet below her and gave a quiet whistle. Now that
had been a tremendous fall for that poor boy. Athena was the goddess of wisdom.
It made Elise wonder why she hadn’t thought to change Perdix into an eagle
instead of a fat little bird who was unable to fly very well. Perhaps the
decision had been unwise, but partridges had taken the opportunity to learn a
lesson from the experience. The bird, mindful of falling from high places, decided
all those years ago not build its nest in the trees. Even today the partridge
doesn’t fly much and avoids high places. One fall from the Acropolis was enough
for that small, plump bird, thank you very much.
Turning from the edge, Elise began to move
toward the covered walkway or Stoa of
Eumenes. She knew a little about partridges. Whoever thought up the words
to the Christmas carol obviously had less knowledge. Thinking of the lyrics
made her wonder about pear trees, and that made her stomach rumble in hunger.
Partridges in pear trees made little sense, but dessert, even this early in the
day, certainly did. She dropped her empty coffee cup into a waste bin and
headed back into the bustling city and the talented chefs who could indulge her
recently discovered craving.
~~~~~~
Apidea
A Greek Pear
Dessert
Ingredients:
6 pears
750 ml red wine
100 g sugar
1 cinnamon stick
6 cloves
Directions:
Carefully peel the pears taking care not to
remove the stalk.
Place the pears upright in a pan; add the
wine and the sugar.
Gently simmer over low heat for 20 minutes.
Add the cinnamon stick and the cloves and
continue to simmer for a further 20 minutes.
Remove from heat and let cool.
Serve the pears cold drizzled with the wine
sauce from the pan.
This recipe is from ThatSouthernBelle and can be found here.
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