Twelfth Night
Happy twelfth day of Christmas! I hope you’re enjoying your twelve drummers drumming. This evening is called Twelfth Night, traditionally the vigil of the Epiphany. In my Monastic Diurnal, Epiphany begins with tonight’s Vespers.
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 the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which is a week from Sunday.
Mind you, there’s no reason to not have the pastries anyway.
We’ll be having our annual Epiphany Feast a week late, which is weirdly becoming a tradition around here.
One of the great Epiphany traditions is the Epiphany house blessing. We normally do this on our Epiphany Feast – which before last year had been on Epiphany Sunday. This year, I suspect we will do it this Sunday. More on that tomorrow.
- 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.