Twelve Plus One Tiger Christmas Tales: Part 6

The Fourth Day of Christmas

Date: 28 December 2014

Original Gift: Four Calling Birds

South African Gift: iTunes Voucher

Price: R150.

Food: Chocolate Brownies

Saint: Feast of the Holy Innocents

Scripture: Matthew 2 (you can get a free copy of the English Standard Version Bible on Kindle)

Activity: Give someone a kind or encouraging word.

On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, four calling birds.

There are different versions to the song at this point. Some mention calling birds while other true loves gave colly or collie birds. It’s all a case of broken telephone and even left some unfortunate true loves with four, or rather 36 macabre coiled birds.

Strange looking coiled bird. Picture from www.rubylane.com

Although the original was likely a colly bird referring to a European Blackbird (colly meaning black and if I had to take a guess I’d say the word has its roots in colliers, or coal miners) the calling variety suit my purposes better. So I’m going with that.

European Blackbird. Would you rather have 36 of these? Picture from www.yetanotherphotoblog.de

I’m not familiar with calling birds, but pretty sure they make a loud noise, or sing. Hence the iTunes gift voucher to the amount of R150. That’s the smallest amount you can load in Checkers and Pick n Pay and I wanted a physical voucher to wrap. It should get you anything between four songs and four albums depending on your taste in music.

As far as food goes, I did draw inspiration from black for the deep-deep brown, nearly black, chewy chocolate brownies.

And not moving away from black birds entirely, there was a bad ass king called Herod – a very black little bird. There were quite a few actually, but this one was particularly grim. He too took part in Advent by preparing for the coming of Jesus, but added his own twist by murdering every baby boy in the area born during that time – just to be certain. He’d heard that this boy would be king and the old fool was desperate to protect his throne. I say fool, because he missed the one boy he meant to kill, and because that Boy never had sights on his physical throne in the first place. All the boys who did however die, are remembered today as the Holy Innocents.

“‘Bethlehem in the land of Judea, you are very important among the towns of Judea. From your town will come a leader who will be like shepherd for my people Israel.’…Herod… gave orders for his men to kill all the boys who lived in or near Bethlehem and were two years old and younger…So the Lord’s promise came true, just as the prophet Jeremiah had said, ‘In Ramah a voice was heard crying and weeping loudly. Rachel was mourning for her children, and she refused to be comforted, because they were dead.’”  Matthew 2:6-18

Finally, you’ll find that many such historical accounts from the book of Matthew are repeated in Mark, Luke and John. Those are the four Gospels (telling about Jesus) and the four calling birds apparently referred to in the carol.

In memory of the poor innocent boys who had to die, the One who survived and the four who told His story, offer someone a kind or encouraging word today. Anyone. Any word. You’ll know.

Now share the love via Twitter or Facebook and tag it with #12TigerTales