The Twelve Days of Amazon

The Twelve Days of Amazon is a workers’ parody that recasts a familiar holiday song as an inventory of warehouse labor. Sung at an informal reunion near Quartzsite, it makes the strains and routines of Amazon work memorable through comic detail, while binding former coworkers in a moment of recognition and fellowship.

Form and Lyrics

The song borrows the cumulative structure of a holiday classic but replaces its traditional gifts with the equipment and bodily costs of warehouse work. Its sequence includes “an ID badge for security,” “two pairs of gloves,” and “three orange vests,” before arriving at “ten sore muscles.” The progression turns workplace provisions into a comic tally: each accumulating gift recalls not festive abundance but the gear and exertion associated with the job.

Warehouse noise enters the parody through “horns a-beeping,” substituted for “lords a-leaping.” That small change brings the workplace into the familiar song’s rhythm, making its soundscape part of the group’s shared joke. The final reference to sore muscles gives the accumulating list a bodily endpoint. The humor does not erase the labor; it makes the labor recognizable to those who have done it.

A Reunion in the Desert

The song was performed during an unofficial CamperForce reunion on Scaddan Wash, a patch of desert where nine Amazon workers and a retired police officer gathered in camp chairs to reminisce about warehouse work. Their meal mixed pork rinds, tortilla chips, and baby carrots with Barb Stout’s homemade vegan egg salad sandwiches. In that informal setting, the parody served as a shared recollection rather than a workplace anthem imposed from above.

The gathering also made room for play beyond the song. The group drew names from a hat for Amazon-branded door prizes, including key chains, bottle openers, lanyards, and flash drives. A blue plastic Frisbee sent Sydney, the Stouts’ Australian shepherd and heeler mix, trotting after it. The reunion’s ordinary details—snacks, prizes, a dog chasing a Frisbee—set the remembered warehouse labor within a scene of companionship and leisure.

Labor, Memory, and Belonging

The Stouts had felt out of place at the rally because their 1996 National Seabreeze motor coach was dismissed as an “S.O.B.”—“Some Other Brand”—and they were made to park apart from the members’ circle. The CamperForce reunion offered a different basis for belonging: the Stouts could reconnect with people whose ties had been forged through hard labor. The song condensed that shared past into a form everyone could sing and laugh over.

Its setting also sharpens the contrast between seasonal work and the gathering’s unhurried time. At Amazon, workers had counted down the days until the season ended; in Quartzsite, the group remarked, it was easy to lose track of time. The parody carries the work season into the desert, but the reunion changes its register: warehouse noise, required gear, and physical fatigue become material for collective humor and remembrance.