I know Christmas is already a distant memory. So is Boxing Day. And there is the New Year to think about. But we are still in the midst of the Twelve Days of Christmas. In fact you have until January 5th! That’s right, you have more time to celebrate.
So why Twelve days? Just a lucky accident of the calendar?
Of course, twelve is a significant number, in biblical terms. Twelve tribes of Israel. Twelve disciples. There are lots of other important twelves.
It all goes back to the solstice , which occurred on December 22 in 2011. On the “shortest day,” the Sun “stands still” (the literal meaning of “solstice”) at its lowest point in the northern sky and then begin its trek back towards the Northern world, bringing light and life with it as the days lengthen.
So while many of us call it the First Day of Winter, it is really the beginning of a “new year” and that’s how the ancients saw it. As I’ve discussed in other posts on Christmas myths, the Solstice was crucial in many cultures and is the source of a great many holiday traditions celebrating light, hope, renewal — and the reason for the season’s general merriment.
Again we have ancient pagan ritual to thank for this Christmas tradition. The Romans, who knew how to celebrate, eventually extended their weeklong solstice party –Saturnalia– into the new year, creating a 12-day period of merrymaking. The early Christians, being in Rome, did as the Romans did. In northern traditions, the Norse also celebrated their solstice festival, known as Yule, for twelve days.
One of the specific ways that Solstice celebrations from ancient times are still remembered is by the “Twelve Days of Christmas.” Largely misunderstood, the Twelve Days of Christmas traditionally begin with Christmas Day and lead up to the Epiphany –January 6– which is also celebrated as “Three Kings Day.” It is believed to be the day on which the Magi visited the Christ Child, or the day of Jesus’s baptism in other traditions. To many Christians, Epiphany (some also call it “Little Christmas”) is the more important and the appropriate date on which to exchange gifts –as the Magi did.
The ancient idea that the world was “turned upside down” until around the Solstice was the source of a Roman tradition of masters and slaves trading places. There was also a Celtic tradition of a period of chaos until the Solstice. This led to the Christian-era “Feast of Fools” presided over by the Lord of Misrule. This idea is immortalized in literature by Mr. Bill Shakespeare, who wrote a play called Twelfth Night. Set on “twelfth night,” or January 5 (the night before Epiphany), it is filled with role reversals –of both class and gender–and general disorder and merriment led by Sir Toby Belch, one of Shakespeare’s greatest comic characters.
The other cultural vestige of the twelve days is the Christmas carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas.
I have always found it a tedious carol. But a fairly modern “urban legend” making the Internet rounds is that the song was devised to teach a series of Catholic virtues and ideas –the catechism– to children, during England’s long wars between Protestants and Catholics. Each of the days, this theory holds, represents a fundamental Church idea: the partridge in a pear tree is Jesus; “four colly birds” (not “calling birds”) are the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; the five golden rings are the first five books of the Bible, or Torah, and so on. This notion is widely disputed by scholars and an in-depth dismissal can be found here:
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/music/12days.asp
And the final part of this tradition says leave the decorations up until Twelfth Night.
