The Twelfth Day of Christmas

It's Epiphany. This is from my Facebook Epiphany post in 2017....

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Here it is Epiphany already. The Twelfth Day of Christmas. We'll turn off the Christmas lights before we go to bed tonight and tomorrow begin putting the decorations away till last week of November. We had planned to celebrate with a neighborhood Three Kings get-together tonight but Sheila's cold turned ugly earlier in the week and we decided against it. Maybe next year.

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Back to 2023 --
Sadly, the last day of Christmas* is now also a day scarred by the memory of the loathsome attack on our Republic by Trumpists.  Some in our Congress actually voted to overturn the most basic of republican values that very day even after the attack. Some of them continue to deny the simple well-documented and court-tested fact of the election results of 2020. And now our 118th House of Representatives will be controlled by apologists for the traitors of January 6, 2021. Patriots cannot rest. We must work these two years to be sure the likes of Andrew Clyde, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaitz, and other extremists are voted out of our Congress.

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*Evidently there are several traditions for counting the days of the Christmas season. Some count the twelve days of Christmas beginning with Christmas Day Dec. 25, others count the twelve days beginning Dec. 26. Some consider Christmastide as lasting till Feb. 2! And commercial Christmas begins about Labor Day and ends when stores close on Christmas Eve. I choose to consider Epiphany/Three Kings Day/Old Christmas (Jan. 6) as the end of the Christmas season. 

😊  So Merry Christmas y'all.

Old Christmas Eve

In Appalachia, at one time, Epiphany was celebrated as "Old Christmas". Richard Chase (the folklorist not the serial killer) in the mid twentieth-century tromped around the hills of the southeast collecting the old stories, poems, and songs passed down from Elizabethan times through these mountain people.Chase was visiting Tom Hunt's hand-hewn log house and soon a passel of relatives and friends of old Tom arrived and the singing and storytelling began.  Here's a bit from Chase's Grandfather Tales:

 

Since on the Christian calendar Advent ends at midnight on Christmas Eve and the official Christmas season begins then, it has been our family tradition for a number of years to keep our modern Christmas decorations up through Epiphany (the Twelve Days of Christmas or Three Kings Day or Old Christmas). Like most Americans we spend way too much attention on the commercial and community pre-Christmas activities and like to try to use the Twelve Days of Christmas for a calmer less frantic celebration.