Description
The festive song, “A Partridge in a Pear Tree,” has inspired thousands of beautiful images like the one on this coin, as well as endless rounds of holiday mirth.
Description:
This fine silver holiday coin is certified to be 99.99% pure silver with a diameter of 34 millimetres and a weight of 15.87 grams. The reverse image by Canadian artist Risto Turunen features a stylized scene of a partridge posed gracefully in a fruit-laden pear tree before a frosty window, beyond which glowing snowflakes fall. The base of the tree, bedecked by holly and pinecones, features a red enameled ribbon. The polished frame surrounding the image is embossed with the words “Canada” and “10 Dollars” and the year “2013.” The obverse features the effigy of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II by Susanna Blunt.
Special Features:
- Snow is falling. The air is cold. The Holiday season is here, and with it we launch a new beautifully designed and exquisitely engraved fine silver coin featuring a selective coloured section to enhance the beauty of the Holiday season.
- Shopping for gifts for friends and family for the Holidays is made easy with the RCM unique holiday coin theme selection sure to please everyone on your list!
- An excellent addition to any collection featuring silver coins, coloured coins, holiday-themed coins, and unique engraving.
- Bring magic this Holiday season with a discerning holiday gift from the Royal Canadian Mint!
Product Specifications:
Item Number:123701
Face Value:10 dollars
Composition:99.99% pure silver
Weight (g):15.87
Diameter (mm): 34
Edge: Serrated
Finish: Proof
Certificate: Serialized
Artist: Risto Turunen
Packaging
Coin is encapsulated and presented in a Royal Canadian Mint branded maroon clamshell case lined with flock and protected by a black sleeve.
Complete Certificate Text:
A Partridge
The festive song, “A Partridge in a Pear Tree,” has inspired thousands of beautiful images like the one on this coin, as well as endless rounds of holiday mirth. But could this famous holiday image actually depict an English-French play-on-words? Some song historians think this may be the case.
The “twelve days of Christmas” refers to a traditional time of festivity and gift-giving between Christmas Day (December 25) and the Twelfth Night (January 6)—the evening of the Christian feast of Epiphany.
“A Partridge in a Pear Tree” was first published in a children’s book—Mirth without Mischief—in England in 1780. But it may have originated hundreds of years earlier—and somewhere other than England—as a “memory-and-forfeit” game in which successive lines were added to a song for singers to remember and repeat. Those who made a mistake or forgot a line had to pay—perhaps a kiss or a candy to the other singers. Such cumulative, add-a-line songs were popular throughout Europe. In fact, “A Partridge in a Pear Tree” has a distant relative in France, where each line of the French song adds another sumptuous dish to eat, rather than “birds” or “lords” or “milkmaids”. Some think the line “and a partridge in a pear tree” is actually a English-French play on words, because the French word for “partridge” is “perdrix” (pronounced “peardree”). Was the line originally, “And a partridge, une perdrix”? No one knows for sure.
Regardless of its mysterious origins, today the song and the images it conjures are deeply evocative of the holiday season for millions of people around the world.
