I’m still wishing people a Merry Christmas, because it’s still Christmastide: today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, and traditionalists will take their decorations down tonight. In fact, this year, most churches will have an unusual thirteenth day of Christmas. Rare indeed will be the place of worship that keeps the Feast of the Epiphany on the appointed Saturday 6 January, rather than transferring it to a Sunday.
I love these dog days of Christmastide, and not just because I’m a church nerd (although that helps).
The secular and liturgical celebrations of Christmas are now to a large degree out of phase. Not entirely, though. Both are at their height on 24 and 25 December: but in the secular world, this is the climax of long weeks of parties and shopping. In the Church, although even here the boundary is eroded by carol services and Christingles, the season should really only begin, with a bang, on the night before Christmas.
For a few days, these worlds remain locked in step, the turkey sandwiches and endless repeats of classic films on TV somehow matching the sparsely attended church services of the run of feast days in late December: Stephen, John, the Holy Innocents and Thomas Becket. These are what the Swedes call the ‘in between days’ or mellandagarna. In these relatively high latitudes they days are dark, and for many this is a time to flake out.
After the final flourishing of partying on Old Year’s Night, the secular world moves on to Dry January and credit card bill horror, making up for its usurpation of what was once Advent’s traditional role as a season of fasting and abstinence.
For the Church, however, this remains a season of celebration, and perhaps one that is all the more revealing because, for most people, Christmas is long over. The phrase ‘the true meaning of Christmas’ usually annoys me – hackneyed and pious and superior: but perhaps in these dog days of the season, something of the true meaning stands out most clearly. God has come into the world, but ‘the world knew Him not’. The shepherds have returned to their flocks. Everything continues as it did before – the schools and office workers are back to their grind and the shops, despite the discounts they flaunt, are now quiet. Beyond surface appearances, however, everything has changed, and although it will be a very long time before that becomes obvious, the first stirrings are there, if you pause to look and listen.
The winter mornings still get darker through the equinox and even Christmas, but by the Twelfth Day they are at last starting to turn and that is much more noticeable in the evenings. As we say today in the Daily Prayer of the Church for the final time (or perhaps this year the penultimate): The darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining; the Word of life which was from the beginning.
