Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you
A Happy New Year . . .

Today is the twelfth day of Christmas; the festival ends some hours from now, on Twelfth Night. In times past the celebrations would have included mumming and wassailing that would have been going on for days, as barriers of class and rank relaxed temporarily and the Lord of Misrule commanded festivities in the courts and great houses of Europe. The popular carol we know as “The Twelve days of Christmas” is a remnant of this past.

According to legend, it was the beauiful Princess Rowen, daughter of the legendary Saxon mercenary, Hengist, employed by equally legendary British King Vortigern, who introduced the custom of Wassail to Britain. Approaching King Vortigern with a golden bowl filled with wine, she offered to toast his health, saying “Lauerd King, wassheil” to which the king was instructed to reply with the word, “drincheil” before imbibing. Vortigern was so beguiled that he sought the lady in marriage and immediately began to give away pieces of his kingdom to her relatives. I first encountered this story in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, but Geoffrey had translated it almost verbatim from another pretty much legendary poet we know as Layamon.

Christmas revels have been variously intertwined with pagan celebrations of the new year pretty much from the beginning. In the English speaking world, January 1 was first appointed as the beginning of the new year by William the Conqueror in honor of his own coronation, and secondarily as the traditional date of Christ’s circumcision. The practice, which came to be known as circumcision style dating soon gave way, however, to the older practice it had replaced, which began the new year with the Annunciation, and appointed March 25 as the day of celebration.

The confusion of dates and dating is partly a result of confusing solar and lunar calendars; our present New Year’s day more or less inaugurates the solar year. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII appointed January 1 as the beginning of the new year, and that date was adopted widely on the European continent. In Britain and the British colonies, however, March 25 continued to be celebrated as the beginning of the new year until 1752, in the American colonies as elsewhere. Present-day arguments about Christmas in the United States have mostly to do with developing pressures to celebrate or to deplore multiculturalism, but the winter festival has always been a time of cultural dissonance.

We recall, too, how the winter festival comes bearing the faces of Janus, the Roman god who looks forward and back, for whom the month of January is named. Light in darkness, ease after war, joy after pain, love and hate, springtime and harvest, youth and age, the coming and going of things. And there is that other as well. “Pity would be no more/if we did not make somebody Poor”—Blake calls it the human abstract, the source of discontent and its like, indifference. The watchmen on the heights at Advent looked backwards towards the death of time and called us to a new wakefulness, a new sensitivity (not different from the old) to the issues of life and death that are woven into the fabric of our being whether we like it or no.

Shall we survive the winter? It is always a question of how much warmth we can husband about us, but if it is we who are to survive it is always a question, too, of how much warmth we can share. Such warmth (which is also warmth of heart) is not a commodity but the pearl of great price. We are given it for a time only that we may give it away.

Next Winter comes slowly, Pale, Meager, and Old,
First trembling with Age, and then quiv’ring with Cold;
Benumb’d with hard Frosts, and with Snow cover’d o’er,
Prays the Sun to Restore him, and Sings as before.

Are change and decay, like growth and presence, built into the nature of things? And do we do them honor in this time when the world turns upside down—is that what it means to celebrate the death of time? “I should be glad of another death,” says Eliot’s Magus. This, in solsitio brumali, the very dead of winter.

Cultural dissonance ought not to blind us to the hospitality and generosity we honor and hopefully extend to others at this season. These have been part of the winter festival as we know it, both Christian and Pagan, for many centuries. The mumming and wassail are reminders that generosity and hospitality are owed among humans. To deny them is not only to deny compassion to others, but also to deny what is best in oneself, to make oneself a worse person. That’s the lesson Ebenezer Scrooge learns, what legendary Wenceslas (about whom I wrote last year) already knew, the lesson Dives in Jesus’ parable fails to comprehend. At bottom, it isn’t a rational lesson; indeed some forms of theology may be its enemy. There are problems with the idea of setting aside a season for honoring generosity and hospitality, but perhaps we need to be reminded that these virtues and their grounding in love of one’s companions are basic to civilized life.

As I say, it’s the twelfth day of Christmas, but Twelfth Night can be understood to conclude a festival time that begins with All Hallows Eve and is perhaps associated in the remote past with the ancient Celtic Samhain and the Roman Saturnalia. Death and rebirth, “Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward“: all of which might serve to remind us of Shakespeare’s play, which features reversals and misrule of many kinds, though it ends happily as we like to think the twelve days of Christmas do. After all it’s the Bard’s best fool but one who reminds us at the close that the world began a great while ago.

Here’s our holiday letter. Just click on the image to open it. Love and joy to all.