I don’t know about you, but I am pretty keen to get the decorations down long before Twelfth Night – usually around New Year’s Eve – which is just as well, really. I don’t think I have ever been in a room where everyone has agreed when Twelfth Night actually is, and thus when the decorations should come down. Is it the night of the 5th, or the night of the 6th, I ask myself.
The problem arises, as I’m sure you know, from two directions. First, do we consider 25th December to be the first day of Christmas, with the twelve days being 25th December to 5th January inclusive? Or do we count from 26th January? And secondly, while we are mulling over that little teaser, what do we mean by ‘night’? Do we mean the evening before the day in question, as in New Year’s Eve, Christmas Eve etc? Or do we mean the evening of the day in question, as in a lovely summer’s eve?
Either way, Twelfth Night today is a pretty bleak day, often ushering in the first day back at work; but it was not always so. In the Tudor period it was a huge occasion, with bonfires lit and pageants and feasting to match anything on Christmas Day itself. 200 dishes were served at the court of Henry VIII in 1532 and Elizabeth I appointed a gingerbread-maker to make figures of herself and her guests. Henry VII had his own Lord of Misrule and an Abbot of Unreason to orchestrate the party. Cakes were made containing a dried bean or pea, and whoever found it was proclaimed the king or queen for the evening. In some cases a clove would be put in the cake, and whoever found that would be designated the knave for the evening, something that Samuel Pepys tried to oil out of in 1666 by surreptitiously taking the the clove that he discovered in his own cake and hiding it in his neighbour’s slice.
In addition to the feasting, Twelfth Night was a time for traditional folk plays and ‘mumming’. Most famously, of course, Elizabeth commissioned William Shakespeare to write a play for Twelfth Night which was first performed in 1602, and remains my favourite of the Bard’s plays, possibly because I studied it for O Level and know chunks of it by heart.
So as we grit out teeth for Dry January or whatever other daft resolution we may have signed up for in a moment of weakness, spare a thought for the jollities of our ancestors. And if the resolution goes west, imagine how much they would approve!