Dame, Get up and Bake Your Pies Lyrics
A wake-up call for Christmas Day morning: the dame is told to get up and bake her pies, and then asked why her maidens are still lying in bed. Each line is sung twice over, so the rhyme is easy to learn on the first try.
Dame, Get up and Bake Your Pies
Dame, get up and bake your pies,
Bake your pies, bake your pies;
Dame, get up and bake your pies,
On Christmas-day in the morning.
Dame, what makes your maidens lie,
Maidens lie, maidens lie;
Dame, what makes your maidens lie,
On Christmas-day in the morning?
Printed from https://nurseryrhymes.co/dame-get-up-and-bake-your-pies/
- Type
- Mother Goose
- Tune
- Sung or chanted with a bounce, the repeated middle lines said a little quicker
- Best for ages
- 2 to 7 years
What Does Dame, Get up and Bake Your Pies Mean?
The rhyme has two verses, and each follows the same pattern. The first line is the call, the second and third repeat it ("Bake your pies, bake your pies"), and the last line is the refrain "On Christmas-day in the morning". Because the pattern never changes, a child only has to learn the new part, "bake your pies" in the first verse and "what makes your maidens lie" in the second.
A dame is the woman who runs the house. Her maidens are the young women who work for her. To lie here means to lie in bed, so the second verse asks what is keeping them there while the pies need baking. The questions are teasing, and the rhyme does not give an answer.
It is a nice rhyme for a household that is waking up early. One person calls the lines, and everyone else joins in on the repeated ones.
History and Origin
James Orchard Halliwell printed this rhyme in his nursery rhyme collection, and Andrew Lang's The Nursery Rhyme Book prints it with the same words.
Learning Activities
- Wake-up call: in the morning, use the first verse as a cheerful way to ask the children to get up, with a gentle tap on a drum or a pot lid after each line.
- Play-dough pies: roll out dough, cut circles, and "bake" a tray of pies while saying the verse over and over.
- Your own verse: ask who else might still be asleep, such as the cook or the cat, and sing a new second verse with the same pattern.
- Echo song: half the group sings the call and half sings the repeats, and they swap for the second verse.