Twelfth Day of Christmas
Monday, January 5th, 2009Today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas. It is also Twelfth Night, the night before Epiphany. According to Wikipedia:
Twelfth Night or Epiphany Eve is a festival in some branches of Christianity marking the coming of the Epiphany, concluding the Twelve Days of Christmas, and is defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as “the evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany, formerly the last day of the Christmas festivities and observed as a time of merrymaking”.[1]
The celebration of Epiphany, the adoration of the Magi, is marked in some cultures by the exchange of gifts, and Twelfth Night, as the eve or vigil of Epiphany, takes on a similar significance to Christmas Eve.
Some people still celebrate these holidays. There’s a person in my husband’s command whose family always exchanged gifts on January 6.
Wikipedia also says that “Twelfth Night marked the end of a winter festival that started on All Hallows Eve — now more commonly known as Halloween.” I think things have pretty much come full circle. It seems that more and more the Christmas season is earlier and earlier, at least judged by when Christmas decorations appear in the stores. Doesn’t it sometimes seem to you like we’re expected to celebrate Christmas immediately after Halloween these days?
What about celebrating a day when everything is turned upside down, with everyone’s roles reversed? Medieval people and ancient Europeans did just that. I’ve already mentioned The Feast of Innocents on December 28–which commemorated when Herod killed the children of Bethlehem–where children’s and adults’ roles were reversed.
It seems they celebrated a similar holiday on January 5 called the Feast of Fools. (Although Wikipedia says that “in the Middle Ages, particularly in France, the Feast of Fools was staged on or about the Feast of the Circumcision, January 1.) The person “ruling” the feast and the festivities was called the Lord of Misrule. Wikipedia has this to say:
The Lord of Misrule symbolizes the world turning upside down. On this day the King and all those who were high would become the peasants and vice versa. At the beginning of the twelfth night festival a cake which contained a bean was eaten. The person who found the bean would run the feast. Midnight signaled the end of his rule and the world would return to normal. The common theme was that the normal order of things was reversed. This Lord of Misrule tradition can be traced back[citation needed] to pre-Christian European festivals such as the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia.[neutrality disputed]
Apparently this celebration could get quite wild and profane,leading to the Church banning it in 1431. Considering this quote from Wikipedia: “The ceremonies often mocked the performance of the highest offices of the church, while other persons, dressed in different kinds of masks and disguises, engaged in songs and dances and practiced all manner of revelry within the church building” and how Carnival is celebrated today, I can just imagine.
Anybody want to revive the tradition? Your boss could work for you for a change.
Please do click on the links above, at the very least the Twelfth Night, Feast of Fools, and Lord of Misrule links. There’s a lot of interesting information there–more than I can put in one blog post.
And last but not least, here is the final installment of the “Twelve Days of Christmas” song I’ve been doing each day. This song itself is a Twelfth Night tradition: it originated as a song sung as a game played at Twelfth night parties. The leader would sing a verse and everyone else would copy. He’d add a line each line, and everyone else had to remember what he’d sung or have to pay a penalty, such as “offering up a kiss or a sweet.[1]“ That, at least, is the most common and accepted explanation of its origins. Click on the song title above to go to the Wikipedia article and learn more.
So here it is, the last and final verse of this most famous Twelfth Night song on Twelfth Night:
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Twelve lords a-leaping
(Eleven ladies dancing
Ten pipers piping
Nine drummers drumming
Eight maids a-milking
Seven swans a-swimming
Six geese a-laying
Five golden rings**
Four calling birds*
Three French hens
Two turtledoves
And a partridge in a pear tree.)
* Note: Wikipedia says “calling birds” is a corruption of “colly birds” which are black birds.
** Wikipedia also assures me that golden rings does not refer to “jewelry but to ring-necked birds such as the ring-necked pheasant.”