twelve days of Christmas - interesting website
Gabrielle Dean
traditions of Christmas. One tradition they discuss is the twelve days
of Christmas. They count Christmas Day up to 5th January as the 12
days, with the Feast of the Epiphany as the beginning of a new feast,
and Twelfth Night as the Eve of the Epiphany. That has a neat logic for
me, although I had never fretted much about 6th Jan being the 13th day.
The site has a day by day description of celebrations, carols, prayers,
liturgies associated with the twelve days - feasts of St Stephen, St
John, Thomas a Beckett, Holy Innocents (Childermass). A really lovely
way of attending to the Christmas season that gives some relief from
the screaming ads and sales. The story below, in the section about the
traditions of the decorations, appealed to me, especially given how
ubiquitous poinsettias were this Christmas - I hadn't realised they had
a significance beyond being red.
http://fullhomelydivinity.org/
Finally, the New World has contributed a flower from Central America to
the Christmas decor and a lovely legend to go with it. The story tells
of two poor Mexican children (their names vary from telling to telling)
who had nothing to offer the Christ Child on Christmas. On their way to
church, they picked some weeds from the side of the road. Although the
other children made fun of them, they placed the weeds before the
crËche. Immediately, they blossomed into the flowers we now call
poinsettias, but which Mexicans call the Flor de la Nochebuena, the
flower of the Holy Night. Tomie dePaola has illustrated this story in a
book for children. It is also said that the red bracts, the colored
leaves that surround the tiny flowers of the plant, resemble the star
that led the wise men to Bethlehem. These plants, which are now used
around the world to decorate for Christmas, get their name from Joel R.
Poinsett, the ambassador to Mexico in the 1820s who first brought them
to the U.S.
The section on the Feast of the Epiphany begins with T S Eliot's
"Journey of the Magi" and the devastatingly acerbic 'For the Time
Being - A Christmas Oratorio' of W H Auden. Then goes on with some info
about the Epiphany:
Having valiantly bucked the culture and kept the Christmas feasting
going for a full twelve days, it would be easy, at last, to give in and
to move on, back to "the old dispensation,", "the moderate Aristotelian
city." And yet, having come so far, wouldn't it be unfortunate simply
to resume the standard routines of our lives as if nothing had changed?
Have we indeed "seen the actual Vision and failed/ To do more than
entertain it as an agreeable Possibility," rather than as the one thing
that really does matter? When the Twelve Days of Christmas are over,
the Church does not go into hibernation. Indeed, what comes next gives
us an opportunity to move from the private ponderings of blessed Mary
and the wonder and praise of the shepherds to a closer consideration of
the public meaning and proper response to all that we have seen and
heard. We must not be at ease, and the Church is not at ease, for the
Twelve Days end with the Eve of another Feast, the Epiphany.
"Epiphany" means "manifestation." The full title of this feast that
begins a new season of the Church Year is, "The Epiphany, or the
Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles." The Epiphany season, which
extends from January 6th through Shrove Tuesday, highlights various
occasions when Jesus was manifested to both Jews and Gentiles. To begin
with, we will focus on the very first manifestation to the Gentiles,
when wise men from the East came to visit the infant Child in
Bethlehem.