Twelfth Night

And why we won't celebrate it

For many of us, Twelfth Night is not a celebration to be observed but the name of a play by William Shakespeare. This is the play that contains the lines:

If music be the food of love, play on.

And:

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

In our heads, we know that Christmas lasts twelve days. We sing about it in the Twelve Days of Christmas song in which geese lay and swans swim. But we would never sing that song after Christmas Day, during the actual Twelve Days of Christmas. Certainly not tonight on 5th Jan which is Twelfth Night. Why not?

Because Christmas is over. Christmas spirit left the building halfway through Boxing Day. That’s the day when we should be giving boxes of alms to the poor and, like Good King Wenceslas, celebrating the Feast of Stephen, the first Christ martyr who delivers a blistering sermon in Acts 7. Instead, on 26^th December, we are congratulating ourselves for getting dressed before lunchtime, checking Amazon for bargains and at least thinking about going for a walk. We are not thinking about further Christmas celebrations. The idea that Christmas should last until Twelfth night on 5^th is for the birds in the song.

And So It Was Decreed

Who says Christmas should last twelve days? The Council of Tours in 567AD, nearly 1500 years ago. This was thirty years before Roman Christianity even arrived in Britain but as England fell under the spell of Roman Christianity (the original European Union), so our Christmas was to last twelve days. It caught on. Read the fourteenth-century classic, Gawain and the Green Knight (or listen to the excellent audio version by Simon Armitage) and you will hear a tale set during the twelve days of Christmas.

Twelfth Night Party, 1650–60, by David Teniers the Younger.

The twelve days decreed by the Roman Church did not perish with the Reformation or Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Twelfth Night celebrations feature in the diaries of Samuel Pepys. By 1827, William Hone wrote in his Every-Day Book that it was the busiest time of year for bakers who were busy making cakes and sweets for Twelfth Night celebrations. Our own Christmas cake, possibly my wife’s finest since we were married twenty years ago, did not make it past 2^nd January.

Why Wait?

Our desire to move on from Christmas speaks volumes about our society which does not and will not wait or savour or delay gratification. Once Halloween and Guy Fawkes’ Night (Nov 5^th) are out of the way – or Thanksgiving in America – Christmas begins. Why wait? We’re not missing out on anything, are we?

Actually, we are: the season of waiting called Advent. It is the time of year when we look forward to Christ’s return. As the first collect of Advent says:

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

It is a prayer of preparation not just for Christ’s return, but the period of waiting.

We don’t like to wait. This may be why Jesus’s teaching ministry is littered with parables about waiting. Servants must be faithful with their resources until the master returns. The owner of a field must wait until the harvest comes when the weeds can be separated from the wheat. Bridesmaids must ensure they have enough oil so they can greet the groom when he eventually comes. The field containing treasure cannot be seized. Everything must be sold so the field can be bought.

We find waiting impossibly hard even though feasting is not only promised and prepared but mandated. Is Twelve Days of feasting not enough? In actual fact, it is too much. We hold up cups too small to receive the full measure of God’s blessing.

We skip the season of waiting, start Christmas early, whilst fitting it in around work and busy lives. By the time Christmastide begins, we’ve already had enough of it. By the evening of Christmas Day, we are wondering about when to take down the decorations. (How about Candlemas on 2^nd Feb? No?) By the end of Boxing Day, we’re checking our emails. And once New Year’s Eve is done, Christmas is well and truly over. And some of us start writing blog posts, since we are addicted to work, not rest. I know I am.

It is a shame that we cannot – and will not – spend Twelve Days celebrating the birth of the God-man who stands at the very centre of time itself, separating the BC from AD. The ancients set the calendar to centre on Jesus’ birth, not his death, resurrection or ascension, as we might have chosen today. That should tell us something. Maybe next year we could do all this differently. Maybe we should start planning that now.

I plan to help with that, which is why this substack has changed it’s name to Cary’s Almanac. But I’ll explain that next week. If you don’t already subscribe, why don’t you do that? It’s free.

In the meantime, have a great Twelfth Night. We’ll be having a Galette Des Rois (The Cake of Kings) which celebrates Epiphany (on 6th) rather than Twelfth Night. But we’ve already eaten the Christmas cake. My suggestion we make another was not well received.