CAMDEN, N.J. -- Although its vestiges are still visible in the January 6 "Three Kings Day" celebration of Hispanic culture, the historic holiday of "Twelfth Night" has been abandoned and forgotten by almost all the rest of the country.
The twelve-day, mid-winter festival Twelfth Night once ended with great public fanfare has receded to leave behind our truncated modern holiday season that views December 25 and January 1 as its high points, and January 2 as the day life goes back to normal.
In recent years, the Camden County Historical Society, along with other historical research institutions like the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the Winterthur Museum and Gardens, has steadily shifted its view to acknowledge how very different today's Christmas traditions are from the past's.
In some ways, the historical record of 18th-century life portrays a Christmas far more drab and low-key than ours today. But in other ways, the same record illuminates a set of traditions -- including that of Twelfth Night -- that invoked the bonds of close community in a ways not matched by our own 21st century high-tech lifestyle.
It evolved from the Roman Saturnalia festival marking the onset of the winter solstice -- that point in late December when the sun, whose daily arc had reached its lowest, darkest, coldest point,
Though originally rooted in pagan fertility rites, the annual practice of an extended winter solstice festival of feasting, family gatherings and public gaiety was later grafted into the emerging Christian culture of Europe. In the fourth century, in a move to placate those it hoped to convert and hold to the new faith, the Christian church pronounced the official date of the commemoration of Christ's birth to be that of the winter solstice: December 25th.
While that period's most important holiday was New Year's, its second most important ended the twelve days on January 6 and was called Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night was a final frenzy of feasting, drinking and often-raucous merry making before the community returned to its daily working grind for the rest of the winter.
The spirit of that annual European custom which joyfully convulsed all society each year is captured in an extraordinary mid-17th century painting by David Teniers the Younger, a Flemish artist who specialized in documenting life among the common folk along Europe's western edge. Titled "Twelfth Night (The King Drinks)," the painting, now in the Prado Museum of Madrid, meticulously details a tavern scene on Jan. 6. Dancing, clowning and consuming prodigious quantities of liquor and food, the patrons are depicted as they follow the practice of crowning one of themselves "king" to rule over the Twelfth Night's
Some believe this paper ballot tradition was instituted as a matter of safety to prevent often-inebriated and distracted guests from inadvertently choking to death on hard beans, coins or cast metal Jesuses hidden in wads of cake.
Wassail, the drink of good wishes and holiday cheer, has been associated with Twelfth Night since the 1400s. The ale-based drink seasoned with spices and honey was served in huge bowls, often made of silver or pewter. It was passed among family members and friends with the greeting "Wassail." The name comes from the old English term "Waes hael," meaning "be well."
From its earliest days, the Twelve Days of Christmas festival involved masked dancers and play actors who cavorted through the streets and visited homes unannounced to beg for holiday treats and drink. In England they were called "Mummers," from the French term "momer," which means to wear a mask. Some historians suggest that when the Christian church initially subsumed the pagan Saturnalia, it may have encouraged or tolerated demonstrations by the newly faithful mocking the old Roman gods. Those early revelers donned grotesque masks satirizing the Roman deities but their masked street antics ultimately became a popular and unstoppable part of the Christian Christmas festival.
Meanwhile, in the castles and estate houses of society's upper crust, dancing remained an important part of the holiday in the form of formal balls.
The socially elegant level to which Twelfth Night celebrations rose in the high society of colonial America can be seen at the annual "Yuletides Past" museum displays that are now an annual Christmas season feature
And Martha Washington's papers, preserved at Mt. Vernon, include her recipe for a huge Twelfth Night cake that included 40 eggs, four pounds of sugar and five pounds of dried fruits.
In the Delaware Valley, Christmas day was even less observed because the area was so heavily dominated by Quakers, who disdained ostentatious holiday behavior.
Other common Yuletide community activities included horse racing, fox hunting, cock fighting, card playing, apple-bobbing, blind man's bluff, nine-pins and other entertainments featuring mock sword fights, fiddlers, jesters, tight-rope walkers, plays and group singing.
Twelfth Night was also the time for each household to conduct its ceremonial extinguishing of the Yule log. Charred remains from the hearth were scooped up and kept for use in kindling the coming year's Yule log. Storing the Yule log remains in one's home also was thought to protect the house from fire and lightning.
Twelfth Night was a key feasting holiday in an era where food presentation itself was a primary entertainment. Affluent hostesses set tables with entrées and desserts created and displayed like sprawling works of edible art. The culinary exhibits were toured and touted like a gallery display before being consumed by the well-heeled guests.
In many ways, Twelfth Night and related Twelve Days customs were an annual catharsis of the community's social tensions, frustrations and anxieties. The public dancing, drinking and street foolery all openly and profusely mocked established authority and normal social controls. It was a time for letting loose that often caused its own kind of social friction.
One 18th century Pennsylvania patrician wrote that the local mummers "were a set of the lowest blackguards, who, disguised in filthy clothes and ofttimes with masked faces, went from house to house in large companies, ...obtruding themselves everywhere, particularly into the rooms occupied by parties of ladies and gentlemen, (and) would demean themselves with great insolence."
The raucous street performing aspects of the Twelfth Night season were extremely popular throughout the Delaware Valley and evolved directly into what is today's Philadelphia's famous Mummers Parade. Another branch evolved into the modern day's New Orleans Mardi Gras.
It wasn't until the mid-1800s that American society broadly broke out of the twelve-day Yuletide tradition that so revered Twelfth Night as the grand culminating party of it all.
During the Civil War, famed illustrator Thomas Nast created the full-blown Santa Claus we know today. Meanwhile, the increasingly industrialized economy that rose out of that war fostered the concept of a Dec. 25 that pivoted around the buying and giving of consumer goods rather than the joys of dancing in the street or celebrating fellowship and good wishes with an ornate cake whose flavor, some said, lingered in the soul for the whole of the coming year.
~ ~ ~ Sandy Levins is a Trustee and director of programming at the Camden County Historical Society.
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