The first three days create a smallholding

In the comic reading of the carol, the receiving family has to handle every gift its daughter finds romantic. A live partridge would probably need securing during transport, and the accompanying pear tree needs a suitable vehicle and somewhere to be planted. Repeating the gift each day produces twelve trees and twelve partridges by the end of Christmas. The turtle doves accumulate to twenty-two, requiring their own housing, and the French hens reach thirty. The imagined parents face the land and animal-care demands of a smallholding, along with increasing noise, as a consequence of gifts they never chose.