We have a tradition in our house of honouring the old Christian traditions of Twelfth Night and Epiphany celebrations. Most people around this neck of the woods don't even know what Twelfth Night is let alone Epiphany. Hubby and I have always taken down our decorations on Epiphany. It is also known as Old Christmas Day home in good old Newfoundland. Epiphany is the day in the Greek Orthodox church that is set aside to celebrate the coming of the wise men to the stable where Baby Jesus was born. It marks the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of the work of Jesus as the Messiah.
As a child growing up my parents never took down the tree until January 6th, but even then the Christmas and New year celebration continued on well into January. Every weekend Mom and Dad would invite people in for dinner on the weekends or would go out to someone's home for dinner because you didn't stop until you had celebrated with ALL your friends. It was exhausting but it also was so much fun. Every weekend there was something to look forward to. It made January pass in a blur of activity. You didn't have time for the mid winter blues!
When I moved away from Newfoundland, all of that came to a resounding halt. Here people put their trees up the first of December and go till Boxing Day and suddenly there is hardly any sign of Christmas at all. But Hubby and I maintain our old tradition of taking down the tree on Jan 6th. However, we do make seldom exceptions.
Our lives are greatly affected by school schedules since Hubby is a teacher. Some years Christmas break fluctuates one way or another so that Christmas break starts a few days before Christmas itself and ending directly after New Year's. Some years it goes the other way and there are no days before Christmas and a few days after New Year's. This year was the former, which means that Twelfth Night and Epiphany are hard to celebrate on the actual day since it falls in the middle of the week and school and homework, tests and other obligations make any celebration virtually impossible.
Hubby and the girls finish school for the Christmas break on the 17th of December (which I loved as it gave me three extra pairs of hands at home preparing for the Big Event) and went till the 4th of January. With Hubby and the girls in school on Epiphany, we have decided to wait till Friday to have our Twelfth Night celebrations and Epiphany dinner. Friday night we will sing carols and watch Christmas specials and hang our Old Christmas Day stockings up before going to bed. Then the next morning we will get up and open our stockings and have a Epiphany mid day dinner and then the afternoon will be spent taking down the decorations and putting them away for another year. We didn't always celebrate that way but when the Daughters got too old to believe in Santa anymore Christmas seemed to drift off into the January blues and it seemed more depressing than anything. Now we have another celebration to look forward to and hanging stocking is always fun.
A couple of years ago I got it into my head to do something nice and so I bought from a local craft lady stockings that were specially made with Old Christmas Day in mind. We now have two sets of stockings for our Christmas celebrations. We have the set we use on December 25th,
and a set that are rather Victorian in design for our Old Christmas Day celebrations.
This one belongs to Daughter #2
This one belongs to Daughter #1
This one belongs to Hubby
And this one belongs to moi!
I've also heard an old wife's tale that once long ago on Twelfth Night, farm animals would bow down at 12 midnight in obeisance to the New Born King. I remember as a child being told that it would happen again the same way when Christ came again. I dearly wanted to live on a farm so that I could watch to see if this would be the year that the animals would bow down again in the barn. And so you see there is a little bit of Christmas magic that lingers until Twelfth Night... and so we celebrate.
I hope you had a wonderful Twelfth Night and a lovely Epiphany Day and if you haven't celebrated it, it's not too late....
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