I don’t like to complain about the generosity of my truelove in this season of giving, however:

Pears are not in season, so I have had to buy several bags of Purina Partridge Chow to feed my twelve partridges. Also, did you know that partridge guano does not wash out of upholstery?

It turns out that turtle doves are just high class pigeons and pigeons, as we all know, are basically rats with wings. I have twenty-two of them. This explains why the maids are more often running through the house screaming and batting turtle doves out of their hair than they are milking.

French hens? French hens are chickens, nothing more or less. So I have thirty chickens underfoot. Thank God they are not laying (see below re: geese), but that doesn’t mean they are not leaving “gifts” all over the floor. I have rolled up all the carpets to protect them from these farmyard menaces.

Calling birds might be all well and good if I only had four of them, but I have thirty-six and they call twenty-four hours a day! Want to be awoken at three a.m.? Fear not, the calling birds will take care of that. Ditto two, four, five, etc.

True, I now have a collection of forty gold rings, but with the price of gold I have been forced to increase my insurance coverage, plus I am starting to look a bit like a mobster.

Did you know that one goose will lay one to two eggs a day? And I have forty-two geese! Forty-two! I literally cannot make omelets fast enough. I asked the lords if they would help me in the kitchen but they will not stop leaping for five minutes. They have knocked over every lamp in the house and half the ladies dancing have broken bones as a result of lordly collisions.

I used to have a swimming pool—a lovely spot where I could relax, paddle around a bit, or just sip a pina colada while lying in the sun. I now have a swannery. There are forty-two swans swanning about in my back yard and I can’t touch any of them because technically they all belong to the Queen. And swans may be graceful and beautiful gliding across a distant river, but in your back yard they are basically noisy, angry poop machines.

The forty maids-a-milking were a gift, but the buckets, milking stools, and COWS are apparently “sold separately,” so I have made a substantial investment in order to have eighty buckets of milk a day. I had some hope that I might train my twelve drummers to churn butter, but no, all they will do is beat the bongos day and night. No wonder the calling birds are always awake.

On the one hand, thirty-six ladies dancing means I can have my own set of Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, and who wouldn’t want to begin every day with those high kicks. But the ladies are all staying upstairs and since the rugs are rolled up (see above, re: French hens) and they all wear taps on their shoes—well, you can imagine the racket. Not that I am sleeping anyway (see above, re: calling birds).

The arrival of thirty lords actually gave me hope, as I figured they could help with cleaning up after the partridges, chickens, calling birds, pigeons, swans, and geese but first of all they say, “We’re lords, we don’t do menial labor,” and secondly, they are all afraid of birds, which only makes them leap more violently around this place.

I’ll be honest, when I heard that twenty-two pipers were moving in, I immediately thought, “Hooray, plumbers!” This is what lack of sleep does to you. Turns out these are not pipers as in “someone who can clean all the swan, goose, pigeon, chicken, and partridge droppings and feathers out of my pipes,” but pipers as in “people who will make the shrillest sound known to man any time the birds quiet down enough the suggest the possibility of sleep.” They do, at least, pipe in the same key in which the calling birds call.

So here is what I have done—I have given the keys to the house to the drummers. There are only twelve of them, so they are outnumbered by maids, ladies, lords, and pipers—not to mention by the one hundred and eighty-four birds on the premises, but perhaps they will find some way to deal with this. I’m going to Antigua.