January 5, known as Twelfth Night, refers of course to the twelfth night after Christmas. The church year begins with the season of Advent and then moves on to Christmas, then Epiphany. Epiphany, according to tradition, is when the magi visited the baby Jesus and offered Him gifts. As many of us recall the seasons and the discoveries of our own lives, we realize that we perhaps remember some years with more nostalgia than others.
My wife and I attempted to do the Twelve Days of Christmas gift-giving back in 1975. We had a roommate, Steve, who was a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD. We had taken him in as a temporary roommate while he was in transition to more permanent housing. We agreed together to have a rotation of gifts: one of us would buy a single gift and we would rotate who got a gift from whom daily for the 12 days. It was a disaster. While we were smart enough to limit the spending to under $5 per gift, it is sobering to realize that those $5 now would be pushing $30. Not only was it expensive, it was stressful to keep figuring out little gifts for all 12 days. Our household never did this again.
If you were to follow the gift-giving of the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” you would end up with 364 gifts. To buy all those partridges, pear trees, and so on in today’s money is $201,345. Astonishing.
The ancient Romans held a popular festival at year’s end called Saturnalia, which had two functions:
To persuade Saturn, the god of agriculture, to provide a fecund harvest in all things from grain to children
To add five days to the Roman calendar of twelve months of thirty days each, completing the needed 365 days
The Twelve Days of Christmas is the Christian adaptation of the Roman Saturnalia, overlaid with the birth narrative of Jesus and the arrival of the Three Kings.
The Roman Christian Church celebrated the Birth of Jesus on December 25 and the arrival of the Three Kings on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany. The twelve days span from December 25 to Twelfth Night —Epiphany Eve, on January 5. In between fall the feasts of Saint Stephen, deacon and martyr; Saint John, Apostle and evangelist; the Holy Innocents (marking Herod’s slaughter of young children in an attempt to destroy Jesus); and the Holy Name (marking the day of Jesus’ circumcision, on which he was officially given his name).
To me, the Twelve Days traditions are an antidote to the over-commercialization of a wonderful Christian Holy Day. I suggest that honoring these Twelve Days might include keeping indoor and outdoor decorations with lights on and lighting candles for the evening meal. On Twelfth Night, in some parts of the world, communities gather with their now-dried Christmas greens and have a wonderful bonfire with those greens. (I merely take a very small branch and burn it in my fireplace.)
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