As Christmastide reduces its sparkle to a faint glow and the decs are stowed in the attic for another year I like to remember what the Monday after the Yuletide fortnight's holiday means.
School: To most kids in Western cultures, like my two Grandkids, it means a return to school after two weeks of rest, partying, rest and partying. Nowadays, in reality, it will have more likely been two weeks of sleep, Minecraft and TikTok, the arrival of long, screenless schooldays again being like a terrible cold turkey without their phones and playstations! The only cold turkey I had to deal with as a kid was on Boxing Day!
Decs: our annual twinkles are packed away again, usually by the 6th, each prized item wrapped and placed in a battered box with Xmas scrawled on the sides. Our baubles, mistletoe and lights recall the candles in the dark of our Christian medieval forbears, shivering through their superstitious nights and even much older pagan feasts of hoary evergreens and evil spirits warmed and warned by an all-powerful Sun. In some traditions the decs are left up till Candlemass, February 2nd, some 64 days since the beginning of Advent on November 30th. That's a long time with the decorations up!
Twelfth Night/ Epiphany Eve/ Old Christmas Eve: made famous by Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, the final festive swish of the Twelve Days of Christmas, was once far more important than Christmas itself, when the Twelfth Cake or Kings Cake was the order of the day. The richer you were the richer the cake and around it was all manner of raucous revelry. It's worth remembering that it is the prelude to the ecclesiastical feast of the Epiphany, the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles and the Three Kings, otherwise known as The Three Wise Men or the Magi. From a date point of view the 5th is also Old Christmas Eve on the Julian calender, the 6th being Old Christmas Day, the 13th Old New Years Eve and the 14th Old New Year, echoes of the lost dozen days when time slipped into the Gregorian year in the 16th Century and in the English speaking world much later in 1752.
And so, stashing the decs back in the loft, the tree laid bare and scoffing the very last of the mince pies, here's to the opening line of the Bard's Twelfth Night;
If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On!
What are you doing today readers? Eating your Twelfth Cake?
