Happy Christmas…what’s left of it. That’s right. It’s the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas, the one when my true love sent to me twelve drummers drumming, to go with the lords a leaping and ladies dancing, and the rest of the frankly inconvenient gifts for the Birth of Christ. Last night was Twelfth Night (we’re counting, remember, from the night of Christmas Eve); cue for festivities and party games chez McDonagh, and a Galette du Rois to celebrate the arrival of the Three Kings to baby Jesus, an event that looms large in more civilised Christian countries such as Spain. Yet there’s been next to no acknowledgement of this important feast in the cycle of the Christian year in Britain, even though Christmas does last twelve whole days, with its crescendo for Twelfth Night. This simple fact was formerly one of the great drivers of the dramatic and musical arts. Before the advent of Puritanism, Christmas really was kept from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, so people had to be entertained and it was over to Shakespeare et al to keep the party going.
The dispiriting thing is that not only is the festivity not marked in contemporary culture (Classic FM – liturgically cloth-eared, as ever – excelled itself yesterday by playing Mozart’s Requiem on the Eleventh Day of Christmas); it is confounded and refuted by the whole Veganuary, Dry January thing. Look, Christianity is up for cultural appropriation; it’s good that other people join the celebrations for the Nativity of Christ even though it’s piggy backing on the Christian feast. Christianity obviously appropriated some of the tropes of paganism for its celebrations – the Germanic Christmas tree has echoes of Yggdrasil, the Norse job, no? But what’s gosh-awful is the way secularists ride roughshod over the festivities by starting a fast and abstinence regime right in the middle of it. Stop it. Now.
You want to be counter-cultural this year, dear reader? Here’s how. Keep the Christian Year. Give things up, including meat, at the right time – during Lent (the 40 days before Easter, when nature is on your side) – and give up the abstinence when Easter arrives, and keep Whit Sunday – that’s Pentecost, the feast of when the church started – as a thing. Time was, the Whit weekend was one of the markers of the British year…it needs reviving.
And this year, let’s start Christmas no earlier than the start of Advent…roughly the beginning of December and keep it up until 6th January. It’s fine for the commercial juggernaut to use Christmas cynically to keep its momentum going; it’s indecent when those same interests undermine the feast too early.
Actually, if you want to be really counter-cultural, go to church. And if your local isn’t perfect, well there’s probably one somewhere not too far away that’ll do. Going to church is the most signal and significant way you can hold out against the spirit of the age and it’ll do you good.
As I say, Happy Christmas.
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