On the Tenth Day of Christmas, my True Love Gave to Me…

January 3, 2021

On the tenth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:
Ten Lords a-Leaping
Nine Ladies Dancing
Eight Maids a-Milking
Seven Swans a-swimming
Six Geese a-Laying
Five Golden Rings
Four Calling Birds
Three French Hens
Two Turtle Doves
and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

They’re either Irish or drunk. Or Irish and drunk. Of they’re cangaroos. Our favorite artists have covered pretty much all variants of the situation.

1. Toni Pilling

Lords a-leaping? We need no lords a-leaping. For the artist behind Tee Pee Creations, we’re in sore need of Festive Fords a-beeping. Fair enough.

If you’re still convinced you don’t need lords but you’re not that much into cars and their noises, Laura Fisk of Fisk and Fern might have what you’re looking for. She did all the 12 days of Christmas with pugs and her pugs are definitely a-leaping.

3. Hester Durkan

I was about to say “it’s not that kind of lords, Hester”, but what do I know? And these lords are definitely a-leaping.

I’ve decided to continue showing you beautiful stuff (or at least stuff I think it’s beautiful) even after Christmas, but instead of having monographic articles featuring single illustrators I’ll be grouping them with themes. As a theme I’m picking the Twelve Days of Christmas, a British carol I adore. If you never heard it (you’re clearly not Britsh) I suggest you take a look at this incredible performance.

books and literature

S.S. Van Dine’s The Scarab Murder

S.S. Van Dine was the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939), an art critic, editor, and novelist from the US who created Philo Vance, apparently one of the defining amateur detectives of the Golden Age of detective fiction. The Vance series ran to twelve

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books and literature

Classic Science Fiction Stories

This is the third collection I read from these charming little light-blue books with the golden pages, and they’re uneven at best. Once again, as such, I have mixed feelings about this collection and I’ll have to proceed scientifically to give a rating, so here

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architecture, engineering and construction

Artificial Integrity in the Age of Anxiety

In 1947, British-American poet W.H. Auden published The Age of Anxiety, a long poem subtitled “A Baroque Eclogue”. In a nutshell, four strangers meet in a bar on Third Avenue in Manhattan, on All Souls’ Night, so it’s even seasonal, in the middle of a

November 4, 2026 9:00 am