Category Archives: Twelve Days of Christmas

Jan 06 2025
6 Comments
Christmas, Epiphany, La Befana, The Gift Bearers, Twelfth Night, Twelve Days of Christmas

Our Epiphany

The Sixth of January brings Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas by our method of counting six days in the old year and six in the new, with Yuletide in its constant role, bridging us across the years: ending our years, starting our years. No wonder, then, Christmas is such an extraordinary time.

For most, Epiphany is the close of the Christmas season. It is said the Magi, who had been following the star through the desert land for twelve days, finally reached the child in the barn on this day. Seeing the child was their great epiphany, and in turn, ours. Epiphany is a celebration even older than Christmas itself. The Church early on recognized that Epiphany holds the great symbolism that this news of the savior’s birth was for all people. The Magi are not from Judea. They are from distant lands. By journeying for twelve days and paying homage to the child, the Magi show that the message is universal.

In our home, we close the main celebration of Christmas on Epiphany night with a simple ceremony at the front door, outside on the front porch. We will gather up all who are in attendance (which very often is just Seth and me)  and we will each take turns writing with chalk on the lintel above the front door the numbers and letters and symbols of a traditional inscription. This year, it will read as follows: 20+C+M+B+25. These are the initials of each of the Three Kings (C for Caspar, M for Melchior, B for Balthasar), punctuated by crosses, blanketed on either side by the year. I tell you this each and every year: For me, the inscribing is always accompanied by a silent prayer that no one will be missing when we gather next to write the inscription again. Depending on the weather, the inscription may be there above the door for a month or it may be there all the year through. And though Christmas be gone, still the inscription reminds us of its presence as we pass each day through that portal. The inscription is a magic charm of sorts, protecting the house and those who pass through the doorway, harboring the goodwill and spirit of the Christ Child, and of the Three Kings, and of Old Father Christmas, too.

It is those Three Kings, the Magi, who bring presents to children in Spain and Latin America. This, done in the overnight hours of Twelfth Night, or Epiphany Eve, which comes upon us as the Fifth of January becomes the Sixth. The Magi are some of the last of the Midwinter gift bearers, but they are not alone, for in Italy, on this same night, la Befana, the kindly old witch, makes her rounds on her broomstick delivering her presents. La Befana is tied to the Three Kings story, for, as the legend goes, the Magi and their grand procession happened to stop by her house as they set out on their journey that first starry night. They asked her to accompany them, but she said, “No, I can’t; I have far too much housework to do.” And I have known so many Befanas in my day: Italian women who are busy, busy, with no time to do anything else but keep the house clean and keep their families fed. It’s a tough job. My family is full of women who would probably say no to the Magi, too, if they were to knock on the door.

And so Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar went on their way, with their retinue and with their camels and with their gifts for the child of frankincense, gold, and myrrh. And as they went on their way, processing forth, la Befana picked up her broom, and began sweeping her home. She swept all the corners of all the rooms, and she swept her pathway, too, to the road. And as she swept and swept, she grew remorseful for not accepting the invitation of the Magi, and so, she decided, she would go and join them after all. But by the time she left her home, the Magi and their retinue were no where to be found. She got on her broom and flew here and flew there, and she searched and searched, but la Befana never found the Magi, and she never found the child. And each year now, on the Eve of the Epiphany, she searches again, in hopes of finding the Christ child. As she searches, la Befana brings presents for the children who have been good, and coal for the children who were not so good in the past year. But even her coal is not so bad a present, for it is usually sweet candy shaped like coal. (La Befana, is, after all, a kindly old witch.)

It is la Befana’s job, too, to sweep away Christmas for another year, and as she does, we return to ordinary time and the workaday world. But if you love Christmas as much as we do in this house, I bring you tidings of good news: your celebration need not necessarily end here with the close of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Though the major part of the celebration is done, the poet Robert Herrick reminds us that it is fine and good, too, to keep the Christmas greenery in your home for the rest of the month of January. This practice follows the ancient customs of his day, and we, here, each year follow Herrick’s lead. It is good at this point to put away many of the more contemporary decorations for the season, but it is perfectly fine, by this custom, to keep the greenery, to keep the candles and the stars and the lights on the tree. As long as the greenery is gone by Candlemas Eve, Herrick says, all is well. Candlemas Eve: the First of February, the Eve of St. Brigid’s Day, honoring Brigid, who bridges us from winter to spring. Robert Herrick’s approach is, we feel, a most sensible approach to Christmastide and the wheel of the year (especially if you, like we, are in love with Christmas).

 

TWELVE DAYS of CHRISTMAS SALE
At the shop, we are back to our regular hours: Saturdays from 11 AM to 4 PM, with occasional special events as well as hours by appointment. We absolutely loved seeing you at all of our Christmas Markets this past December, and we look forward to seeing you more in 2025. This Saturday at the shop (as well as online), our Twelve Days of Christmas Sale continues (a little longer than planned), with rare temporary markdowns on many of our Christmas items, as well as clearance prices on Christmas specialty foods, chocolates, and cookies. CLICK HERE to shop, or come see us this Saturday from 11 to 4 at the shop. The address is 1110 North G Street, Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460.

 

Twelfth Night fire in the chilly Lake Worth January air with roasted chestnuts and Rhineland steins of St. Bernardus Christmas Ale: It was a fine night.

 

Jan 02 2025
5 Comments
Book of Days Calendar, New Year, Twelve Days of Christmas

Winter Landscape, Or Your January Book of Days

 

Happy New Year, and Wassail! It’s January and here (much timelier than last month) is your Convivio Book of Days calendar for the month. Our cover star is a wintry scene of a nontraditional sort by Wassily Kandinsky, called “Winter Landscape.” The colors called to me, and so here it is.

My new year resolution is to be more timely about getting the monthly Book of Days calendar prepared and published for you, and two days into the month seems not so bad for the first one of the year. Devoting more time to writing the Convivio Book of Days blog would be another good resolution, but while the Convivio Bookworks shop is still new, that particular resolution would seem likely to fail, so I will stop short of making it. I will promise, however, to do my best to be better about such things. I do think it may be easier to do so in 2025 than it was in the past year. By now, a lot about the establishment of the shop is done, and I am hopeful that this year, things will more easily fall into place each month as we follow patterns that we established in 2024. But it’s all very new territory, we’ve found, and, as usual, we shall see what we shall see.

One way I’ve found to still bring you a bit of daily inspiration, at least during these Twelve Days of Christmas we are in this yuletide season, is through our Instagram page: @conviviobookworks. If you don’t already follow us on Instagram, I invite you to do so. Since Christmas began last week, I’ve been posting a daily image and a very brief summary of the traditions for each of the Twelve Days of Christmas, as I’ve come to realize that although I may not have the time, sometimes, to write a chapter for this blog, I can certainly write a little something that can be posted to Instagram. If you’ve missed the abundance of writing that was here before we opened the shop, well, we can, at least, keep in touch via Instagram. (I’m pretty sure each Instagram post also posts to our Facebook page (though I am not terribly active there aside from these cross-posts from Instagram).

As for the shop, we are back to our regular hours: Saturdays from 11 AM to 4 PM, with occasional special events as well as hours by appointment. We absolutely loved seeing you at all of our Christmas Markets this past December, and we look forward to seeing you more in 2025. This Saturday at the shop (as well as online), our Twelve Days of Christmas Sale continues, with rare temporary markdowns on many of our Christmas items, as well as clearance prices on Christmas specialty foods, chocolates, and cookies. CLICK HERE to shop, or come see us this Saturday from 11 to 4 at the shop. The address is 1110 North G Street, Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460.

Happy Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Happy Kwanzaa! Happy New Year! Happy Twelfth Night!
John

 

Image: “Winter Landscape” by Wassily Kandinsky. Oil on cardboard, 1909 [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Jan 07 2024
4 Comments
Christmas, Copperman's Day, Plough Monday, St. Distaff's Day, Twelve Days of Christmas, Yule

Bid Christmas Sport Good Night

ST. DISTAFF’S DAY
January 7

Even as the Twelve Days of Christmas end, Christmas, in its way, lingers: The season has such a grand presence that even what follows is informed by it or comes about as a result of it. And so it goes with today, the Seventh of January, when we celebrate St. Distaff’s Day, which is the first of two Back to Work holidays that come about after the Twelve Days. This one is for the women. The next Back to Work holiday is for the men. It’s called Plough Monday, and it comes on the Monday after Epiphany, which this year is on the Eighth, but, depending on the day of the week on which Epiphany falls, could be up to six days later than St. Distaff’s Day. This suggests to me that it was the men who made the rules here. Be that as it may, it is Robert Herrick, our wonderfully convivial 17th century British poet, who gives us our best description of the day (and some very good advice in the first two lines):

Saint Distaff’s Day, or the Morrow after Twelfth Day
by Robert Herrick, 1648

Partly worke and partly play
Ye must on St. Distaff’s Day:
From the Plough soone free your team;
Then come home and fother them.
If the Maides a-spinning goe,
Burne the flax, and fire the tow:
Scorch their plackets, but beware
That ye singe no maiden-haire.
Let the maides bewash the men.
Give St. Distaff all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport good night;
And next morrow, every one
To his owne vocation.

Women have always had a lot of domestic tasks to handle, but during the Twelve Days of Christmas, one of those tasks would be paused: the spinning of fiber to make cloth. And if she had a spinning wheel in her home, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve each year, when greenery from nature would be brought in to decorate the home, one of the key items to be decorated was the spinning wheel: greenery would be wound through all the spokes and over the wheel and it would be beautiful of course but also, as a result, unusable. Which was the whole point. No work was to be done for the Twelve Days of Christmas––though we can be sure that the women had plenty of other work to do during the holiday. And on this day each year, January 7, the day following Epiphany, it was back to the spinning for the women, and it was St. Distaff who led the way.

Oh but wait! This saint is no saint at all. Saints were real people like you and me before they were named saints, but St. Distaff is fictional. The English have a long history of creating saints’ days for saints that never existed at all. St. Monday was the name given to the long weekends sometimes taken by shoemakers, and St. Tibb was often used as a metaphor for never, as in, “Hey, I lent you a shilling last week; when will I get my money back?” “Worry not, I’ll be sure to have it back to you by St. Tibb’s Day.” Which is all well and good until the lender realizes that there is no St. Tibb’s Day. Neither St. Tibb nor St. Monday ever existed; nor did St. Distaff. The distaff, however, was a central tool to what was considered in those days “Women’s Work”: the spinning of wool or flax to make fiber for weaving into cloth. The distaff and spindle were the tools that preceded the spinning wheel, and rare it would have been to find a woman who knew not how to use them. We get the word spinster from this, which was once a recognized legal term in England to describe an unmarried woman, and the terms spear side and distaff side were also legal terms to distinguish the inheritances of male from female children.

And so the women returned to their spinning each Seventh of January, this “morrow after Twelfth Day.” Meanwhile, the men were still underfoot in the house. Their job on St. Distaff’s Day was one of mischief, with the goal usually being to set fire to the flax the women were spinning. The women were wise to this custom, though, and typically kept several buckets of water nearby. Very often, it was the men who got the worst of it: to have a bucket of water dumped on you in the cold of January (that’s the “bewash the men” part)… for sure, St. Distaff’s Day lent a bit of excitement to the sport of returning to ordinary time. Meanwhile, the men had customs of their own to attend to, preparing for their day.

PLOUGH MONDAY
First Monday after Epiphany, which this year will be Monday January 8

The men got a moveable date for their traditional Back to Work day. The men’s work focused on the farm, and on this Plough Monday it would be not at all unusual to see a gaggle of men parading through the village with a finely decorated plough. The men themselves would be finely decorated, too, in all manner of foolish costumes, hearkening the Feast of Fools aspect of the Twelve Days of Christmas that have just passed. One man will be dressed as the Bessy, an old woman, and there she is again: the personification of the old hag of winter, the goddess in her crone stage. There would be mysterious old dances and a good deal of noise in the banging of drums and the blowing of horns, and perhaps the performance of an old mummers play, and, certainly, there would be a collection box passed around to help pay for the sport (as well as a few rounds at the tavern). There would be a ceremonial ploughing of the ground, too, very often through the dirt road that ran through the center of town. Those who were too stingy to contribute risked having the path from the road to their door ploughed, as well. Best, then, to contribute a few pennies to the men’s sport.

There is another old tradition in the Netherlands for this First Monday after Epiphany, little known, but important to those in the print trade (and to us here at Convivio Bookworks, for we are, at heart, a print shop): It is Copperman’s Day, a traditional Dutch printer’s holiday in which the printshop apprentices would be given the day off so they could work on a project of their own. The small prints that were a result of the day were typically sold for a copper apiece. I’ve been a printshop apprentice many times in my life: before, during, and after grad school, while I was earning my MFA in the Book Arts from the University of Alabama, I would go to Maine each summer to apprentice with various printshops there: once with David Wolfe at Wolfe Editions in Portland, and twice with Brother Arnold Hadd at the Shaker Press at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in New Gloucester… which began our long friendships with both wonderful guys, but especially with the Shakers, who by now are like a second family to us.

I make a Copperman’s Day print most years… but, as with everything else here at Convivio Bookworks, I tend to be a little slow about it, and though I’ll begin on Copperman’s Day, or maybe even on St. Distaff’s Day, it will be pretty amazing if I finish by the time Copperman’s Day is done. When this year’s print is done, though, I will let you know here on the blog, and perhaps even show you some progress on our Instagram page (@conviviobookworks). Meanwhile, CLICK HERE to see all of our previous Copperman’s Day prints. Just like St. Distaff’s Day and Plough Monday, you’ll find our Copperman’s Day prints are also informed by a lingering Christmas spirit. This year’s will be no different.

And so: Back to work, back to the workaday world. In this house we are holding on to our Christmas greenery and music all through January, until Candlemas, as is our custom… but even with these trappings of Christmastime still in the house, we are back to earning a living again, and earning our daily bread, and back to regular routines.

 

Today’s two images, like bookends on this chapter, are taken from the Chambers Bros. Book of Days, published in Edinburgh, 1869. The top one illustrates their chapter on St. Distaff’s Day; the bottom one, Plough Monday. You may click on each to make the images larger.

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