The twelfth night was a big time celebration with people holding large parties. During these parties, often the roles in society were reversed with the servants being served by the rich people.
This dated back to medieval times when the “Twelfth Night” marked the end of winter, which had started on October 31 with All Hallows Eve (Halloween).
At the start of Twelfth Night, the Twelfth Night cake was eaten. This was a rich cake made with eggs and butter, fruit, nuts and spices. A dried pea or bean was cooked in the cake.
Whoever found it was the Lord (or Lady) of Misrule for night. The Lord of Misrule led the celebrations and was dressed like a king (or queen). This tradition goes back to the Roman celebrations of Saturnalia.
During the Twelfth Night, it was traditional for different types of pipes to be played, especially bagpipes.
Lots of games were played including ones with eggs. These included tossing an egg between two people moving further apart during each throw — drop it and you lose; and passing an egg around on spoons. Another popular game was “snapdragon” where you picked raisins or other dried fruit out of a tray of flaming brandy!
The Twelfth Night is celebrated on January 5, which is the evening or night before epiphany, when the nativity story tells us that the three wise men visited the infant Jesus.
The Twelfth Night or January 5, has been celebrated as the end of the Christmas season since the Middle Ages.
One of the most important days in the Christian calendar, the Twelfth Night also marked the Feast of the Epiphany, when the three wise men, or Magi, arrived in Bethlehem to behold the Christ child.
If day one is counted as Christmas Day, December 25, then the Twelfth Night is celebrated on the evening of January 5, the eve of the epiphany.
On the other hand, if day one is counted as the day after Christmas, December 26, then the Twelfth Night is celebrated on January 6, the evening of the epiphany itself.
Epiphany is celebrated 12 days after Christmas on January 6 (or January 19 for some Orthodox Church who have Christmas on January 7) and is the time when Christians remember the Wise Men (also sometimes called the Three Kings) who visited Jesus.
The epiphany is also when some churches remember when Jesus was baptised, when he was about 30, and started to teach people about God.
The epiphany means “revelation” and both the visit of the Wise Men and his Baptism are important times when Jesus was ‘revealed’ to be very important.
Some churches use the epiphany to celebrate and remember both the visit of the Wise Men and Jesus’s baptism. The epiphany is mainly celebrated by Catholics and Orthodox Christians. The epiphany is an ancient Christian feast day and is significant in a number of ways.
In the East, where it originated, the epiphany celebrates the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the River Jordan.
It also celebrates Jesus’s birth. A fitting definition of the term epiphany is “a moment of sudden or great revelation that usually changes you in some way”.
Historically, Christmas was a minor holiday and not many people celebrated it; with the major celebrations reserved for epiphany or the Twelfth Night.
The Twelfth Night or January 5 marks the end of the traditional Christmas celebrations and is the time when Christians are meant to take Christmas decorations down — although some people leave them up until Candlemas.
Candlemas commemorates the ritual purification of Mary, 40 days after the birth of her son Jesus.
This day also marks the ritual presentation of the baby Jesus to God in the Temple at Jerusalem. The festival is called Candlemas because this was the day that all the church’s candles for the year were blessed. A fixed date event, it takes place 40 days after Christmas on February 2.
No party is great without a great old drink, and “wassail” was drunk during the Twelfth Night.
Wassailing was a very ancient custom that is rarely done today. The word “wassail” comes from the Anglo-Saxon phrase waes hael, which means good health.
Originally, the wassail was a drink made of mulled ale, curdled cream, roasted apples, eggs, cloves, ginger, nutmeg and sugar. It was served from huge bowls, often made of silver. Jesus College, in Oxford University, has a wassail bowl that is covered with silver.
It can hold 10 gallons of drink! Wassailing was traditionally done on New Year’s Eve and the Twelfth Night, but some rich people drank wassail on all the 12 days of Christmas!
Over the centuries, a great deal of ceremony developed around the custom of drinking wassail.
The bowl was carried into a room with a great fanfare, a traditional carol about the drink was sung, and finally, the steaming hot beverage was served.
From this, it developed into another way of saying Merry Christmas to each other.
The song, The Twelve Days of Christmas is an English Christmas carol. From 1558 until 1829, Roman Catholics in England were not permitted to practise their faith openly. Someone during that era wrote this carol as a catechism song for young Catholics.
It has two levels of meaning: the surface meaning plus a hidden meaning known only to members of the church.
The “True Love” one hears in the song is not a lovesick boy or girlfriend but Jesus Christ, because truly love was born on Christmas Day. The partridge in the pear tree also represents Him because that bird is willing to sacrifice its life if necessary to protect its young by feigning injury to draw away predators.
Mumming is also an ancient pagan custom that was an excuse for people to have a party at Christmas.
It means “making diversion in disguise”. The tradition was that men and women would swap clothes, put on masks and go visiting their neighbours, singing, dancing or putting on a play with a silly plot.
The leader or narrator of the mummers was dressed as Father Christmas.
The custom of burning the yule log during the 12 days of Christmas goes back to, and before, medieval times.
It was originally a Nordic tradition. Yule is the name of the old Winter Solstice festivals in Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe.
The yule log was originally an entire tree that was carefully chosen and brought into the house with great ceremony.
The largest end of the log would be placed into the fire hearth while the rest of the tree stuck out into the room.
The log would be lit from the remains of the previous year’s log which had been carefully stored away and slowly fed into the fire through the 12 days of Christmas.
Different chemicals were sprinkled on the log like wine to make the log burn with different coloured flames.
Potassium nitrate for violet, barium nitrate for apple green, borax for vivid green, copper sulphate for blue, and table salt for bright yellow colour respectively.
* Dr Sushil Sharma is an associate professor of meteorology at FNU. Views expressed are his and not of this newspaper or his employer.
