New to our countdown this year is Allan Sherman and his version from 1963 of "The Twelve Gifts of Christmas." There have been dozens of record albums and CDs that collect comedic Christmas recordings and this selection is on about two-thirds of them, often called "The Twelve Days of Christmas."
By any name, I loved this song since I was eleven. Many years later when I was writing Garfield and Friends, I subconsciously stuck in a joke about an "indoor plastic birdbath" without realizing where I'd gotten that phrase. Several folks who saw the cartoon wrote to inform me but they were all nice enough to refer to it as an "hommage" instead of a "plagiarism."
This video may seem like Mr. Sherman and his singers are doing a clumsy job of lip-syncing to a pre-recorded track but I don't think so. As I recall, this was a number that he wrote and performed on some TV show taped several weeks before Christmas. Someone — Sherman or his record company — got the idea that it should be a record and they quickly rushed it out as a 45 RPM release using the music and vocals from the show. It was later included on one of his albums.
So why is it outta sync here? I can think of several possibilities, one being that whoever assembled this video for YouTube laid the stereo rendition from the record over mono (or silent) footage from the TV show and they didn't quite match up. Or maybe the record was made from an alternate take of the number from the show. Or something. Anyway, I think the audio you're hearing was recorded at the same time with the same singers but maybe not the exact same time. It's still a great song…