Happy Fourth Day of Christmas. Kindly note the Twelve Days of Christmas are not a new concept. They started in 567 with the Coucil of Tours. It was originally designed to bridge the gap between the two ways Christmas observances were celebrated. Eastern rite and Western rite.
Why? Because if you celebrate normal Western rite, you celebrate on Christmas Day or December 25. If you celebrate Eastern rite rite you celebrate or celebrate in addition on the 12th day of Christmas, or Epiphany.
So this is not a new concept that self- baptized lifestyle and style gurus can claim credit on.
There are actual historical facts behind this.
And most people I know keep their Christmas trees up until Epiphany.
Why?
The 12 days of Christmas. Also, from a practical standpoint, you put all this work into Christmas decorations you might as well look at them until you feel like the nutcrackers, elves, and Santas are staring back at you from the bookshelves. I’m speaking from personal experience here.
A funny story in my family was the year my father didn’t take the tree down till close to Valentine’s Day. My father was very particular with his Christmas trees. For example, they could only be silver and gold and certain kinds of ornaments, which is probably why my Christmas trees are kind of a riot of color. Daddy would put the ornaments up every year in a certain order and you could never go out of order or there might be an Italian Christmas temper tantrum. It was pretty funny, but he loved his Christmas tree. However, you could only also put the ornaments away in a certain order so it was hard to be helpful and he wanted to do it himself only one year it didn’t happen until close to Valentine’s Day!
And another funny story were when friends of mine were single girls, and the tree didn’t come down until probably closer to March and they were in an apartment. I don’t know why this happened but it was a live tree when it was first put up and a very dead tree with brown needles when it came down. And apparently there were things involved like changing the ribbons on the tree for Valentine’s Day. By the time they took the tree down, it was like Miss Havisham from Dickens’ Great Expectations had moved in.
Now I do know people that as soon as December 26 rolls around and boom all those decorations come down. But also for me and my family today, my stepfather is British so we do Boxing Day some years if people are around. And friends of my parents when my father was alive always had Boxing Day parties.
So Christmas being a season isn’t a new concept. It’s a traditional Christian concept and perhaps modern marketing has steeped its new philosophies in that but I don’t really know.
Now I don’t live in medieval times, I live in the real world, and if I did something separate for all 12 days of Christmas, my husband might lose his mind. He’s already pretty good-natured when Christmas takes over the entire house.
The 12 days of Christmas also our feast days for different saints. I’m not going to go into all of them. You can look them up on the Internet and there’s this website called Why Christmas that lays it out easily.
Now Twelfth Night parties used to be a really big deal. You would hear about those in the Times of Henry VII of England, for example. Complete with Christmas cake, and a Lord of Misrule and role reversals between servants and masters. Ironically, these celebrations go back to Roman times, and more pagan origins.
What started me on this? A lifestyle person’s self-marketing videos honestly. And there was this whole thing about the third day of Christmas and they were serving Affogato.
Affogato is a simple Italian dessert of Espresso and ice cream. But now some are saying make it with red wine. Well to me that’s a nonstarter. But in all fairness, I am allergic to red wine so I would never serve this in 1 million month of Sundays.
The recipe this person used was basically an ice cream sundae with red wine poured over it. You can find it from two years ago on a website called We Are Not Martha. If I did drink red wine, I would wonder why I would want to do this to wine or ice cream.
Another person who did this a couple of years ago was Giada DeLaurentis. Her recipe to me actually had more merit because she essentially made a holiday mulled wine and put it over vanilla ice cream. However, the reviews I read on this are mixed. Marie Claire Magazine wrote about it as a summer dessert in 2016.
Sadly, to me it seems like a waste of both wine and ice cream. I could see this dessert made for Christmas by adding whatever you would add to an alcoholic coffee along with the espresso to the ice cream, but not wine. To each their own. I’m kind of a purist when it comes to these things just like I think a cheeseboard is the only kind of board you need to have. Not butter or dessert or anything else.
And the thing I love about Christmas are the traditional dishes that go with the Christmas season. Sometimes you don’t need to dress them up, they are what they are. You can do a Yule Log or Bûche De Noël. I have friends who do make those and they’re absolutely gorgeous, but I remember the days of Walter’s Swiss Pastry in Bryn Mawr and Viking Pastries in Ardmore. Walter’s Bûche De Noël were the best, but Viking’s were good as well. I am a baker, but I do not have the skill set for these so when I want one, I ordered them from the Master‘s Baker in West Chester. We were a very small Christmas gathering this year so I didn’t order one and just served my own Christmas cookies after dinner, but are photos of two I have had over recent years from them:
Other years, I have served a white fruit cake that I make with Courvoisier. And yes, my cake is not used as a doorstop people actually really like it. Here is the base recipe from a few different vintage cookbooks :
So yes, I am kind of a traditionalist when it comes to certain Christmas things. It’s like I do use linens and china and fun often vintage wine and other glasses. I actually try to use my vintage and antique china whenever I can and as many people know my every day is vintage Fiesta ware because it just makes me smile. And my mother has always encouraged me to use the stuff I have because she said rightfully, so what are you saving it for? Use it it’s meant to be used.
Yes, it takes a little extra time to clean up when you use good plates but it sets a nice table. And people say they don’t want to use good things when it’s the holidays because of kids, but I don’t know since we all grew up with our parents using real china and glassware and linens and everything survived and a lot of it got passed on? And other people I know don’t want to use it because they think it’s too much time to clean up and it’s really not. It’s just a routine.
It’s like Christmas trees. We all have our routines based upon family traditions. I have a main tree in the living room and two little trees in bedrooms and they make me happy.
When I’m getting out my old ornaments and the ornaments that people have given me over the years at Christmas it makes me smile with a happy memory when I open up the boxes. I will admit when I use my father’s ornaments sometimes I get a little teary-eyed but that’s because he loved Christmas and they remind me of him and then I laugh because he had his decorations routine.
I am a crazy collector of vintage ornaments. And then there are the ornaments my friends have given me. I love them all, and I wish I could use them all every year, but I can’t. So I cycle my ornaments around. Some ornaments always come out like the little Peter Rabbit from my parents’ first Christmas tree I guess circa 1961.
Other Christmas things I love are Christmas books. I always have. I also have to cycle those around. I have some different ones out this year but here are photos of some others I have:
The Twelve Days of Christmas are a lovely song and a centuries old tradition with deep roots. Live and love your Christmas joy but please don’t turn your wine into a fake sundae. And check out PNC’s index on what the 12 days of Christmas now cost. They have been doing this for 40 years. The brain behind this for many years belongs to the former wife of someone I knew years and years ago. However I still think PNC is a crappy bank.
Enjoy the rest of the magical days of Christmas!
