Twelfth Night

Happy twelfth day of Christmas! This evening is called Twelfth Night, traditionally the vigil of the Epiphany.

This was traditionally a time of feasting and festivity (all of which seem to include various varieties of enormous pastries) marking the end of Christmastide and the beginning of Epiphanytide¹.

These days, of course, the calendar has been moved around a bit and the Christmas Season doesn’t end until next Sunday’s feast of the Baptism of the Lord.

Mind you, there’s no reason to not have the pastries anyway.

We’ll be having our annual Epiphany Feast a week late, mostly because on the third of January everybody was still recovering from the New Year.

We haven’t yet decided when we will do the traditional Epiphany house blessing. We were entirely too ill this past Sunday – not to mention suffering from a distinct lack of chalk.

We normally do this on our Epiphany Feast – which in past years has been on Epiphany Sunday. We might just do it (chalk permitting) on the 6th, or perhaps we’ll wait for next Sunday.

After all, it’s the end of Epiphanytide, surely?

1. Epiphanytide was originally the Octave of Epiphany, running to 13 January. After various reforms, this vanished as an official (sub)season, but certainly this last week of Christmas has a different character than the previous twelve-ish days even still. I see no reason that one couldn’t refer to the time between the Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord as Epiphanytide. At least unofficially.