Tag Archives: Twelve Days of Christmas

Dec 24 2021
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Christmas

Merry Christmas

It’s Christmas. All the preparations, all the frenzy, and suddenly it just appears, like the first star that glimmers after sunset on a cold night, or a just-born baby entering the world. The child and the star, part of our Christmases since the very first one, before Christmas was even called Christmas. Like the solstice story and the celestial mechanics of our universe, it is another story of which we never tire. We hear it year after year, and it means something different to us each time. And if the setting is right––a dark church, incense, a heartfelt song––the story sends us into the recesses of memory, into the arms of people long gone. The story brings us to tears, or at the very least, a moment of wistfulness. For there are the characters in the story that we hear––the Magi, the shepherds, the angels––but there are the characters we each add to the story, too, not the least of which is the child we once were. And at Christmas, we get to go back and reacquaint our old self with the more recent model. With any luck, the two recognize each other, and hopefully, even like each other.

Christmas Eve brings Christmas Day and the Twelve Days of Christmas. Depending on how you calculate such things––and there are two approaches––the Twelve Days begin on Christmas Day itself or on St. Stephen’s Day, the 26th of December. Our ancestors, who perhaps were more attuned than we to the passing of the days and to each day’s meaning, loved symmetry in numbers, and my hunch is that the system they used set the First Day of Christmas at St. Stephen’s Day. Christmas Day itself has long been seen as a day outside ordinary time. For those of us who follow the model of St. Stephen’s Day being the First Day of Christmas, Christmas Day is seen as a distinct day, followed by a beautiful symmetry that comes along with the passing of the year. In this model, we have six days of Christmas in the old year and six days in the new, creating a balanced bridge at the start and end of each year, a balance that links the other old story––that of the ever expanding round of the year as this old earth spins on its axis and rotates around the sun––to the story of the child’s birth at Bethlehem. The links connect Christmas through the years in a lovely balance. More mystery, of the universal sort, heavenly yet here on earth.

However you count your days, I am here simply to encourage you to mark them. One of the saddest sights, I think, is to see a Christmas tree tossed to the curbside for trash pick up the day or two after Christmas, and so I tend to stay in the first few days of the season. But I like it at home, anyway. It is where I feel most content. I hope you’ll join us at your home in celebrating the full season that lasts through Epiphany on the Sixth of January. And if you are a bit in love with Christmas as we are in this household, welcome. Advent has ended, Christmas has just begun. Our Christmas tree and other greenery will be illuminated tonight and every night through Epiphany, and most likely we will go even beyond, for traditionally the greenery would come down at Candlemas Eve: the First of February. Keeping it up longer would invite goblins into your home, and no one wants that. But to bring light and cheer through January is, I think, a wonderful thing.

I don’t plan on writing a Book of Days chapter for each of the Twelve Days of Christmas this year, as I’ve done other years. It’s been a very busy time, and once I make and send our Christmas cards, I am looking forward to spending some time just being still, and maybe I’ll get to read a book or two or three, and there are a bunch of Christmas movies I’d like to watch. It’s feeling like a good time to hibernate and to eat cookies for breakfast and to stay in my pajamas each day ’til 2. It’s Christmas. I think the kid I used to be would give his stamp of approval.

Merry Christmas to you all.
John

If you’d like one of those cards Seth & I will be making this coming week, just send us a holiday greeting that includes your return address, no matter where you are, and we promise one in return. You’ll find our mailing address at the Contact Us page of our website. Love and light to you all!

 

 

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Jan 06 2021
10 Comments
Christmas, Epiphany, La Befana, The Gift Bearers, Yule

20 + C + M + B + 21

TWELFTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
Epiphany

I know, I know: the title of this chapter of the Convivio Book of Days looks more like part of an algebraic equation than the start of a piece about the Twelfth Day of Christmas. It’s actually an inscription, one that we will be writing in chalk on the lintel above our door tonight. It is Epiphany: the day that tradition tells us the Magi arrived at the stable to see the newborn child. It is the part of the Christmas story that expands it to the world beyond Bethlehem, for the Magi came from afar to see this miracle, and brought the news with them back to their lands. Seeing the child was their great epiphany, and in turn, ours.

They are known as Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, those three wise men, and it is their initials, surrounded by the new year, that make the inscription that we will write above our door. It’s a tradition taught to my family by Father Brice, who would bless chalk and give it out to his congregation at St. Paul’s in Lighthouse Point each Epiphany Mass. I’ve never known anyone else to follow this custom but Father Brice and my family, but two summers ago––when Seth and I traveled to the part of Austria where a half hour drive could find you in Switzerland or Germany or Lichtenstein, depending on which direction you were going––we saw so many doorways inscribed, both indoors and out. The doorway in the photo today is the door to the chapel at Schattenburg, the 13th century castle that looks out over the City of Feldkirch in Austria. I photographed an awful lot of doorways that trip. Surrounded by so many lintel inscriptions, I felt like I was amongst people I understood, and who understood me.

The holiday itself is older even than Christmas, as holy days go. It is one of the earliest celebrations of the Church. In some places, Epiphany rivals Christmas––especially in Latin America, where the Three Kings made their rounds last night, delivering presents, just as they did that first Christmas. They stop on their way through Italy, too, to invite la Befana, the kindly old witch, to join them. As usual, she was far too busy with her housework, which, in my experience, is usually the way things go. (My family is full of Befanas, women and men who get so wrapped up in making sure their houses are as clean and tidy as possible, and I’ve no doubt they would have declined the invitation of the Magi, too.) But that first Christmas, when la Befana told the Magi to carry on without her, she eventually grew remorseful for not joining them… and so she set out to find them. Alas, it was too late. She never found the three kings and she never found the child, and so each Twelfth Night, even to this day, she rides out on her broom in search of them all. As she searches, she leaves presents in the shoes of good children. (Not so good children? They get coal, but even that isn’t so bad, because la Befana’s coal is sweet as candy.)

It is la Befana’s job to sweep away Christmas, too, for another year. Before she does, though, you will find us outside on the porch with a stepladder and a piece of chalk (no longer blessed, for Father Brice is long gone). We do this here at our home, and we’ll do it at the family home, too, when next we are there. All who are gathered will take turns writing the inscription on the lintel above the door: it is, as I said, the initials of the wise men, blanketed on each side by the year, punctuated with crosses: 20+C+M+B+21. Each year, my silent prayer outside in the cold night air is that no one will be missing when we next gather to do this. There the inscription stays, all the year through if the weather be fine. And though Christmas be gone, still the inscription reminds us of Christmas’s 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 that doorway, harboring the goodwill and spirit of Old Father Christmas.

And while I promised that you’d be rid of me now, after twelve continuous days of writings, the fact remains that tomorrow brings another Christmas-related holiday: the 7th of January each year brings St. Distaff’s Day, the first of the Back to Work holidays on the heels of the Christmas season. It’s too fascinating to not discuss… so if you have room in your hearts for one more visit from me this week, I will do all I can to be there. And so be it.

I’ll be talking about these things and showing some good books, too, today at 3 PM Eastern on a Jaffe Center for Book Arts webinar called Book Arts 101: Caravan. You have to register to watch the live broadcast on Zoom: click here to register. There will be a simulcast on the Jaffe Center’s Facebook page, too. And on Friday, from 2 to 5 PM Eastern, you’re welcome to join me again as I host the Real Mail Fridays St. Distaff’s Day Social. Come and go as you please; most folks joining in will be writing letters, but sometimes I do other things, like bind books. There is good music and lots of quiet working time in the company of others, and once or twice an hour, we break for a some focused conversation. 

 

Tagged
Jan 04 2021
Christmas, Yule

Quiet Time, & Preparation

TENTH DAY of CHRISTMAS
St. Titus’s and St. Gregory’s Day, Handsel Monday

With no particular customs associated with this, the Tenth Day of Christmas, I always take it as good day to prepare for the celebrations to come in the next couple of days: Twelfth Night and Epiphany. To that end, I’m going to include today the recipe I give you most years on the blog ahead of Epiphany: our recipe for Three Kings Cakes, steeped in the ancient flavors of that old desert land where the Christmas story first unfolded.

As for today, this Tenth Day of Christmas brings the Feast Day of St. Titus and St. Gregory, and it’s also St. Rigobert’s Day and St. Ramon’s Day. Titus was a disciple of St. Paul in the first century, and Gregory was a bishop in the sixth century. Rigobert had a trying time of it as an early Archbishop of Reims––political matters mostly––and he is held up as a model of patience. He kept a goose as a pet; that would take some patience, too. Ramon is particularly difficult to know; he was a bishop and he appears in the Chambers Bros. Book of Days on January 4 for the year 1869, but I have found no mention of him since in more contemporary sources.

Those same Chambers Bros. resided in Edinburgh, and in Scotland in ages past this First Monday after New Year was known as Handsel Monday, a day not so unlike Boxing Day in England. Servants and workers were given a hearty meal and a gift in hand (that’s the handsel), as well as the day off from all labor. It was the traditional day to bestow presents upon the mail carrier and the newspaper boy. In more rural areas the day was often kept at its Old Style date, celebrated on the Monday after the 12th of January and called Auld Hansel Monday (like our New Year’s song Auld Lang Syne). If there are readers in Scotland (Carolyn, I’m talking to you!), I’d be curious to know if any celebration of Handsel Monday continues today.

So, take today as a day of quiet, or, if you still have it in you to celebrate another grand event or two (I told you at the start that the Twelve Days of Christmas are extraordinary days that reside outside ordinary time) then let’s start preparing, for tomorrow evening brings Twelfth Night and the next day, Epiphany. In this house, we sometimes mark these closing days of the Yuletide season quietly, and sometimes with a big meal and a gathering of family and friends. This year, obviously, it will be quiet. With Twelfth Night and Epiphany, our focus shifts outward––toward the Magi who traveled to see the child and outer yet, to the star they followed on their journey. Stars make us think of larger things: far distances, light, the galaxy and the universe beyond. Christmas itself is close to the heart, but with Epiphany, the heart expands, as the universe, too.

Here at home, we bring out the illuminated paper star lanterns come Twelfth Night and we make Christmas sweets that, no matter how much we try to make earlier, we never seem to get made until the last few days of Christmas. Maybe it is a subconscious decision, for these baked goods feel older, more influenced by ancient flavors, flavors old and familiar to the Magi: Baklava flavored with honey and walnuts, and our friend Paula’s Kourambiedes cookies, each studded with a clove, and our Three Kings Cakes, flavored with honey, rose water, currants, and dates––flavors of the desert, of our ancient past, of that very first Christmas. The cakes are contemporary riffs on old flavors, but the Baklava and the Kourambiedes have a much longer history, the stuff of time immemorial. It’s easy to imagine that our friend St. Macarius, the fourth century confectioner that we celebrated on the Eighth Day of Christmas, was making these very same things in his shop in Old Alexandria.

So, while there are no particular customs for this Tenth Day of Christmas, mine has become the making of these delicious Three Kings Cakes, so they are ready for Twelfth Night and Epiphany, and perhaps this is the best custom of the day. The recipe yields three cakes, cakes you will prepare in three loaf pans. You will end up with one cake for each of the Magi, who have traditionally been called Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, though no one knows who they were really. As the story goes, it took the Magi all this time to travel through the desert, and seeing the child lying in the straw was their great epiphany. Rose water is the main flavoring, mysterious and familiar all the same. We happen to sell a wonderful rose water made at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in Maine. If you’re local and you need some to bake these cakes, and if you don’t mind coming by for a pick up at our front porch here in Lake Worth Beach, use discount code PICKUP when you check out at our website; the code will deduct the $8.50 shipping charge. I’ll also be happy to make a free bicycle delivery to you if you live in our 33460 zip code––be sure to include your phone number when you order so we can arrange a pick up or delivery time.

This recipe began with Jeff Smith, who loved Christmas, but I’ve altered it over the years and this year, I updated it a bit more: I’ve cut down a bit on the currants, but added in some chopped dates. Again, more of the flavors of that desert land. Yule love these cakes! (Sorry, I get a big kick out of that. You can rest easy now that that’s probably the last time I’ll get to use yule that way this Christmastime.)

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T H R E E   K I N G S   C A K E S
makes three cakes

For the Batter
1 cup butter
generous 3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2  cups currants
1 cup chopped dates (pits removed, of course)
3 cups applesauce
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
4 cups flour

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Cream together the butter and the sugar, then add the eggs and vanilla. Beat smooth before adding the remaining ingredients. Grease 3 loaf pans (about 8″ x 4″ x 3″ or so) and divide the batter amongst the pans. Bake for one hour, or until a toothpick poked into the center of each cake comes out dry. Let the cakes cool in their pans on a rack.

For the Syrup
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 cinnamon stick
6 whole cloves
2 tablespoons rose water

Once the cakes are baked, combine the syrup ingredients, except for the rose water, in a saucepan over medium heat. Once the sugar dissolves, add the rose water. Remove the cinnamon stick and the cloves and then pour the hot syrup over the cakes in their pans, divided equally amongst the three cakes. The syrup will soak into the cakes. Allow to cool completely before unmolding from the pans. Serving the three cakes on three platters makes for a nice presentation on Epiphany Day or on Twelfth Night.

 

Image: “The Three Magi,” an illustration from the reproductions of Herrad of Landsberg’s Hortus Deliciarum by Christian Moritz Engelhardt, 1818. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons. The original book, known in English as The Garden of Delights, was made by Herrad of Landsberg, a 12th century nun and abbess of Hohenburg Abbey. The original perished in the burning of the Library of Strasbourg in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, but luckily we do have Engelhardt’s 19th century reproductions.

 

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