Sixth Day of Christmas — Six Geese A-Laying
Long dismissed as a nursery rhyme, The Twelve Days of Christmas belongs to the English recusant world: a culture of memory, symbol, and whispered catechesis formed under persecution. Read catechetically, the carol unfolds as a compressed rule of faith—Christological, Trinitarian, moral, and ecclesial—fully consonant with the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the Baltimore Catechism, Sacred Scripture, patristic consensus, and the Church’s liturgical year.
Creation Ordered and Renewed: The Six Days of Creation
By the sixth day, the carol has led the attentive soul steadily backwards through the economy of salvation: from Christ Himself, to the Scriptures that testify to Him, to the virtues He infuses, to the Gospel voices that proclaim Him, to the Law that prepares for Him. Now it reaches its furthest horizon—not merely historically, but metaphysically: the act of creation itself. The “six geese a-laying” signify the six days in which God ordered the universe, calling light from darkness, form from formlessness, and life from nothingness.
This is not a decorative flourish. It is a doctrinal necessity. Christmas cannot be understood unless creation is first understood. The Incarnation presupposes creation, just as redemption presupposes something real to be redeemed. God does not enter an illusion, nor does He repair a mistake. He becomes flesh within a world He Himself has freely created and solemnly declared to be “very good.”¹
The six days of Genesis affirm that reality is intelligible, purposeful, and ordered by divine wisdom. Creation is not the result of violence, chance, or divine exhaustion, but of deliberate speech: “God said… and it was so.” This is why the Catechism of the Council of Trent treats creation as the first article of the Creed and the necessary foundation of all subsequent doctrine. God is confessed first as Creator of heaven and earth because everything else—law, covenant, Incarnation, grace—depends upon this truth.
Against every gnostic impulse, ancient or modern, Christmas proclaims that matter is not a prison from which the soul must escape. It is the very medium God chooses in order to come near. Flesh is not the enemy of salvation; sin is. The body is not discarded at Bethlehem; it is assumed. The six days of creation therefore stand as a permanent refutation of any Christianity that seeks salvation by denial of the material world rather than by its sanctification.
The Fathers insisted upon this with great seriousness, precisely because they lived in cultures saturated with gnostic temptation. St Basil, in his Hexaemeron, labours carefully through the days of creation to show that the world is rational, ordered, and good, because it proceeds from a rational and good God. Creation, he insists, is not a disposable backdrop, but a meaningful work worthy of contemplation and reverence.² The same conviction underlies St John’s Prologue: “All things were made by Him.” The Evangelist immediately binds this to the Incarnation: *“And the Word was made flesh.”*³ The logic is unmistakable and uncompromising. The Creator enters His creation not to negate it, but to restore it from within.
Here the symbolism of the carol sharpens. The geese are not merely present; they are “a-laying.” The image is one of fecundity, continuity, and life handed on. Creation is not static. It is dynamic, generative, and ordered toward fruitfulness. God’s first command to living creatures is not restraint, but blessing: “Increase and multiply.” Christmas does not revoke this command; it renews it. In the Child born of Mary, creation itself begins again—not from nothing, but from grace. A new Adam enters the old world, not to erase it, but to heal it.
For recusant Catholics, this doctrine carried particular weight. In post-Reformation England, they found themselves pressed between two distortions. On one side stood a Puritan suspicion of materiality—of feast days, sacred seasons, beauty, music, and bodily devotion—a narrowing of religion to interior sentiment alone. On the other side emerged an increasingly secular vision of nature, where the created order was stripped of sacramental meaning and reduced to utility. The recusant Catholic, deprived of public liturgy yet clinging to the Church’s teaching, quietly resisted both.
The carol does the same. It affirms that creation is good, but not autonomous; beautiful, but not self-explanatory. It is ordered toward God, and it finds its fulfilment when God Himself enters it. Christmas therefore sanctifies not only souls, but time and matter: night becomes holy; winter becomes luminous; the ordinary becomes charged with divine presence.
Meditatively, the sixth day calls the Christian to recover wonder. Christmas is not merely about the forgiveness of sins, essential though that is. It is about the renewal of the whole cosmos. The Roman Catechism makes clear that redemption is restorative, not annihilating: grace heals and elevates nature; it does not abolish it.⁴ To live Christmas rightly is therefore to see the world again as creation, not as raw material or disposable stage.
The six days of creation thus teach a truth easily forgotten in every age: redemption is not escape from reality, but its healing. The Child in the manger is the same Word who said, “Let there be light.” And once again, light shines in the darkness—not to destroy the world, but to save it.
- Genesis 1:31.
- St Basil the Great, Hexaemeron, Homilies I–IX.
- John 1:3, 14.
- Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part I, on the First Article of the Creed (God as Creator), and Part II, on the effects of grace in restoring fallen nature.
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