So passes the season

It is traditionally twelfth night on which Christmas decorations were taken down, but someone must have reinvented that tradition in recent generations, if we even remember it. It was the original tradition that decorations for Christmas would only be put up the evening before Christmas Day, not some time in November as some households seem to do, and every shop. In the Middle Ages at least one would work until Christmas Eve and raise a bough of holly over the door to mark the beginning of twelve days’ holiday.

In countries that cling to popery, our twelfth night is the day for giving presents, not Christmas Day, as the 6th of January is Epiphany, known in the Roman religion as the feast of the Three Kings, who brought gold, frankincense and myrrh; not Playstations, bicycles and socks from auntie.

(In vain we Protestants try to inform them that they have mistranslated the word μαγοι, and no reference is given to their number, but by strict reading of the Gospel, many of the traditional assumptions are shown to be without foundation.)

I would never wish to deprive others of cakes and ale on whichever day. Nothing in scripture compels us to celebration on any given day nor forbids it. That is a puritan’s dilemma; it is necessary to destroy a non-biblical tradition, but with no authority for actual condemnation, so that the condemnation itself is non-biblical. It seems that you cannot be any sort of activist or reformer without a manner of necessary hypocrisy.

The decorations have been down for days now the whole land over, so maybe the tradition is dead again. We have been back at work for a week. Our real Twelve Days of Christmas start in Advent and end at New Year – maybe then that is the tradition now, and traditions must start from somewhere. Often one hears in a country district “that’s an ancient tradition – but no one has done it for many years”. So no tradition at all then?

If we are culturally all at sea, I should be all for inventing new traditions and reinventing old ones, to give structure to society. Then again, I see people who have embedded themselves in cultural institutions, asserting authority themselves to foist novel ideas, as new traditions the rest of us are required to follow. Of that I am uneasy.

As to Christmas and New Year traditions, they seem to be settling into a pattern we can all understand, and we are free I hope still to dissent and go our own way, and that gives a structure to the process of the year. I think of the end of the years as like the night, when the frenetic mind stops in calm sorts itself out in our sleep so that we are ready for the coming day. The break from Christmas to the New Year, our Eight Days of Christmas, does the same for the soul.