Happy Christmas, all. Wrong sentiment for the January issue, you think? Not so. This issue will be with many readers as near to New Year’s Day as the post allows. In other words, you may be reading this right in the middle of the Twelve Days of Christmas.
The Christmas carol of that name, with its fantastically catchy tune and brilliantly memorable (but only in part) words, is about the only reminder in our time that the Christmas season does not stop on New Year’s Day but continues to the Epiphany, the feast of the coming of the Three Wise Men to pay homage to Jesus, on January 6.
It was the second Council of Tours, in 567, which first confirmed that the 12 days between Christmas and Epiphany were to celebrate the birth of Christ. Normal saints merely have an octave; that’s eight days. As for the Orthodox Churches, most celebrate the feast on January 7, according to the Julian calendar, though the Armenians do so later in the month.
In other words, we are really talking about a festive season, not just three days. The uncle of mine who used to declare after tea on December 25, “Well, that’s Christmas over for an- other year” could not have been more wrong.
The celebrations that begin on the Vigil of Christmas – Christmas Eve – come to a second crescendo for Twelfth Night, the Vigil of the Epi- phany. Before the Reformation and for many years afterwards, the festive parties culminated on Twelfth Night with theatricals and games – including that well known play by William Shakespeare. Nowadays, when the custom of celebrating feast days from the night before is little known, about the only vigil we still celebrate is Christmas Eve. As for the Epiphany, it’s now known dispiritingly as the time when people put their by-then-exfoliating Christmas trees out for collection and take down the decorations. This is all just wrong.
Catholics need to take much more seriously the obligation to keep the party spirit going for the duration of the feast. We simply shouldn’t be undertaking diet regimes on New Year’s Day; we should ideally be going to church and certainly entertaining neighbours and friends. Indeed there are a succession of feasts throughout the Twelve Days of Christmas which combine with the celebrations for the birth of Christ to make for a vivid holiday season.
In Ireland, the day after Christmas is still known as St Stephen’s Day; there follow the feast of St John the Evangelist on December 27, the Holy Innocents (28) and St Thomas Becket (29). New Year’s Eve is in Europe better known as the feast of St Sylvester, after the great pope, though a few people celebrate St Melanie of Rome instead. In other words, there is – or should be – terrific momentum within those 12 days to keep the party going.
Before the Reformation, wealthy families would vie with each other in the festivities they would hold in their homes to which they would invite their neighbours. And keeping open house for 12 days takes formidable preparation… but then Advent was not then a time for premature celebration of Christmas. It was precisely a period of getting ready.
Epiphany itself is known in Ireland as “Little Christmas”, or “Women’s Christmas”. It was when the women of the family would take the day off and go visiting each other and taking refreshments at others’ homes after the long hard graft of cooking for the festivities. It’s an idea that could usefully be maintained in our own day.
But it would be wrong to think that Christmas ends on the Epiphany. In fact, the whole of January was effectively once part of the Christmas season, which entered a gentle decrescendo until the final feast of Christmas on February 2: Candlemas, or the Purification of the Virgin, when candles are taken in procession through the church and blessed. It is essentially a festival of light.
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