 Snopes.com, a website reviewing urban legends, Internet rumours, e-mail forwards, and other stories of unknown or questionable origin, also concludes that the hypothesis of the twelve gifts of Christmas being a surreptitious Catholic catechism is incorrect.None of the enumerated items would distinguish Catholics from Protestants, and so would hardly need to be secretly encoded.The now-standard melody for the carol was published in 1909 by Novello & Co. English composer Frederic Austin fitted the words to a traditional melody, to which he added his own two-bar motif for "Five gold rings".