Embracing the Twelve Days of Christmas

When Christmas’s tide comes in like a bride,
With holly and ivy clad,
Twelve days in the year, much mirth and good cheer,
In every household is had!
—Thomas Durfey, “Drive the Cold Winter Away”, 1675

Throughout my childhood, I begged my dad to leave the Christmas decorations up until January 5^th—Twelfth Night, the Eve of the Epiphany, and the last day of Christmas. Invariably, however, regarding the whole holiday season as “a bother”, he would have everything packed up and put away just after New Year’s Day, before classes resumed at the public high school where he taught biology.

Maybe the tent revivals and snake handlers of his West Virginia childhood had put him off religion for life—he almost never accompanied my mom, brother, and me to church. Though we always came home to a “hillbilly breakfast” of bacon, homefries, toast, and eggs sunny-side up, tilting the skillet then spooning the hot bacon grease over the tops of the eggs to cook them. Or maybe he really meant it when he said he didn’t want to be bothered with the artificial tree and the blinking, colored lights after school started. In any case, he had no interest in Christmas being twelve days long.

I’ve always loved Christmas and typically drop between 30 and 40 holiday cards into the mailbox after church on the first Sunday of Advent. As parenting young children got its hooks into my time, the cards would dribble into USPS custody from Black Friday to Advent 4.

In the past three years, since early-onset Parkinson’s has become more disabling, I’ve found myself racked with guilt over presents unsent, cards unanswered, and a social world contracting around me. Stress and self-loathing crept in where once the angels sang.

Today, December 27th, I put the last of my cards and gifts into the mail. I typed up letters (hand-writing them is no longer an option) that began like this:

December 27, 2024
St. John’s Day (3^rd Day of Christmas)
Philadelphia

Hello, XXXXX!

I know this is ‘late’ if you consider Christmas to be one day only. But since it seems to get harder every year for me to get things into the mail ‘on time’, I have decided to ‘make a virtue of necessity’ and intentionally stretch Christmas into its traditional twelve days…

Softening the capitalism-induced laser focus of December 25, now that I have embraced it fully, has given me a lightness and ease of mood and spirit I haven’t felt around Christmas in a long time. I know my youngest goddaughter is probably a little baffled, and my two elder goddaughters will probably not be together when the matching stocking caps I sent arrive at their parents’ house, but I feel like I’ve added years to my life, and they love me, so I think we’ll all be OK.

And after all, why would we want to cram all the “mirth and good cheer” of the Christmas holidays into one day? Or feel like we’re “doing it wrong” if we have to visit one family “on the day” and then rush off to visit another a few days later? Heck, slow down and make it a week later! There are twelve whole days to work with! Pour a glass of eggnog and put your feet up. God knows, we “need a little Christmas” now, as Auntie Mame sang. We need it badly. Spread it out. Make it last.