Before I Get Caught Out Again, When Exactly Is Twelfth Night? Must I ...

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NOOKS AND CRANNIESBefore I get caught out again, when exactly is Twelfth Night? Must I take my Christmas decorations down before it, during it or not until after it? What happens to me if I get it wrong?

  • YOU MUST take your decorations down by Twelfth Night (which you will recognize by the fact that your true love will have sent you twelve whatevers doing something-or-other). Otherwise, you must leave your decorations up till Shrove Tuesday, when you take them down, burn them, and cook your pancakes over their flames.

    David Lewin, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon ([email protected])

  • TWELFTH NIGHT is the end of the season of Christmas celebration, starting at Christmas itself. The fact that we seem to celebrate Christmas in advance during the season of Advent tends to spoil the fun and can make the post-Christmas period an anti-climax, relieved for us only by another shoppingfest at the January sales. When you take your decorations down depends upon when you put them up, but 6 January is a good marker - and the feast of the Epiphany, when you can celebrate the coming of the Good News to all.

    Nick Shields, Wakefield, W Yorks ([email protected])

  • TWELFTH NIGHT is the Eve of Epiphany, Epiphany being January 6. The early Christian Church had no festival of Christ's birth. Easter was its main festival and, besides that and Pentecost, it celebrated Epiphany (the showing of Christ to the world) as a major festival. However, observance of the pagan festival of mid-winter survived and the Church compromised, saying that many of the ceremonial observances were so divorced from pagan worship that it did not matter if Gentile Christians took part - provided that the emblems of the rituals were removed before Epiphany. So the pagan symbols came down on Twelfth Night. Later the Church "Christened" the midwinter festival as Christ's Mass (just as the festival of Eostre was subsumed into Passover and the remembrance of Christ's Passion) but the 12-day rule was retained.

    Laurens Otter, Wellington, Salop.

  • I ACQUIRED a children's book which states that if you do not take the Christmas decorations down on January 6, you must then leave them up until Candlemas Day, February 2. It then claims that if after that date, so much as a berry or leaf is left, "the goblins can get through the keyhole and spill the milk, crack the china and let the rats and mice into the larder". Perhaps someone should inform my local supermarket, where I have found tufts of tinsel in the ceiling corners as late as June.

    Dave Fornax, Haywards Heath, West Sussex.

  • I was simply wondering what was the definition of Twelfth Night and the answer seems to be as ambiguous as the festival itself. Logically, it should be the night of 6 January (i.e the twelfth night after the 25 December) but now I am also told (by some of the brightest boffins around ) that it could be 6 January. Come on men, make your educated minds up, 5 or 6? So I still don't know, no wonder the bloody world is in such a state. Didn't someone once say something about the blind leading the blind? How true.

    Cheryl Wall, Redditch, UK

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