A 12th Night Rerun: Explanations and Books


Entertainment round the fire for 12th Night

A few years ago I wrote a piece for the Guardian newspaper about Twelfth Night – origins, explanations, and mentions of it in literature. I also did my own blogpost back then, featuring the article. I have seen sufficient discussion of 12th Night online today to think it is worth running the post again – and I hope you enjoy it. It’s not too late to organize a 12th Night party!



This entry appeared on the Guardian books pages: it’s about celebrations of Twelfth Night in literature. It starts by explaining the strange fact that there’s no general agreement on whether 12th night is 5th or 6th January – a fitting enigma for a mysterious and secretive feast.

This is part of the article:

In James Joyce’s short story The Dead, from his collection Dubliners (1914), Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta go every year to an important party held by the Misses Morkan. There is dinner, dancing and singing, but alongside the festivities we see darkness and contemplation: snow falls over Ireland, and Gabriel looks through it as he thinks about his own shortcomings and about the wife whom he thought he knew. The idea of a character having a metaphorical epiphany, a moment of revelation or realisation, comes directly from Joyce, and each story in Dubliners features one. So although the event is not specified as being on Twelfth Night, it is in the early days of January and is always assumed to be an Epiphany party – an idea is made overt in John Huston’s 1987 film of The Dead.
Gretta listens....
....in the full glory of some passion...

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld there are Twelfth Night customs, involving a man who
“finds a special bean in his tucker, oho, everyone says ‘you’re king mate’ and he thinks ‘this is a bit of all right’ only next thing he’s legging it over the snow with a dozen other buggers chasing him with holy sickles so’s the earth’ll come to life again and all this snow will go away.”
This description (from The Folklore of Discworld, which Pratchett wrote in 2008 with Jacqueline Simpson) is gently satirising the imaginative Victorian social anthropologist James Frazer, who describes similar customs in his not-wholly-reliable study of mythology and religion, The Golden Bough.

… and there are more examples from Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, and Antonia Forest.

READ ON HERE AT THE GUARDIAN BOOKS PAGES


wearing your best dresses for a 12th Night party

Since writing the piece, I have come across another reference, in the intro to WM Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring. He complains that while visiting Rome:
if you wanted to give a child's party, you could not even get a magic-lantern or buy Twelfth-Night characters—those funny painted pictures of the King, the Queen, the Lover, the Lady, the Dandy, the Captain, and so on—with which our young ones are wont to recreate themselves at this festive time.

--and he invented a story to amuse some children in the absence of the party: that's the illustration at the top. In fact Italians have their own tradition, of an old woman, Befana, who delivers presents and sweets to children on Epiphany Eve.

So authors have used Twelfth Night celebrations as the setting for fun, mischief, malice, epiphanies, the taking of power, and life-altering events – I’m surprised there aren’t more of them in fiction.


And also, Twelfth Night parties are a great tradition, and we should all have more of them.











Comments

  1. An excellent post, Moira; I'm glad you reminded us of it. Twelfth Night is such an interesting tradition, isn't it? And you're right about following it more. We ought to have more Twelfth Night celebrations. Now you're making me want to see what there is in crime fiction about Twelfth Night...

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    1. Oh what a great idea Margot! After I wrote the original piece, I discovered too late an Ellery Queen book, The Finishing Stroke, set over the 12 days of Christmas. I was sorry I hadn't been able to include it, so I hope you will!

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  2. I think fictional Twelfth Night parties like the Merricks' one are dependent on parents who don't work (landed gentry types) and children who go to private school (longer holidays). In the real world everyone's back to school and work by the 5th/6th (admittedly not this year but that's an exception) so not really the right time for big parties. I'm always envious of the Marlows who seem to have lots more holiday still to go even after Twelth Night.

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    1. Yes, it always seemed so far from anything that would happen in my life. But I did love reading about such events... It comes up in my entries on John Verney's February's Road too. This blogpost in particular: http://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2018/05/februarys-road-by-john-verney.html

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  3. Moira: No Twelfth Night parties in rural Saskatchewan. The parties for that night in Saskatchewan are likely to be Ukrainian families celebrating Christmas Eve by the Eastern calendar.

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    1. Oh fascinating - I didn't know there was a Ukrainian population there. It is a great night for a party, whatever the origins!

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  4. In Sweden 6th January is an official holiday (a pity it fell on a Sunday this year, so was not really noticeable) but is called "Trettondag jul" or "Trettondagen", in other words 13th day rather than 12th night. But then Swedes celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, i.e. the 24th, so I suppose it makes sense? This is the day many people take down the Christmas tree, unless they do it a week later on what is - yes, really - known as "Tjugondag Knut" which means 20th day (Knut is just the name of the day in the calendar). There are heated debates on which is the correct date - I just read a blog post by a young woman blogger who was appalled by the number of people who take down their tree too early. According to her anything before Tjugondag Knut, i.e. 13th January, is too early. (I should add that we don't put up the tree until the night before Christmas. Which is of course the evening of the 23rd. Gosh, this is complicated…)

    When I was a child, in the 1950s, it was common to have a children's party in connection with taking down the tree. It was called "Julgransplundring" i.e. "Christmas Tree Plundering" (See - Swedish is easy!) and I suppose the tradition went back to the times when the ornaments in the Christmas tree were edibles: apples, nuts and sugar cones. These days I don't think anyone gives Christmas tree plundering parties, either on the 6th or the 13th of January, mainly because of the dearth of ambitious full-time housewives who see it as their motherly duty to arrange these things. One thing rather astonishes me when I think back of it: We lived on the fifth floor in a block of flats and the highlight of the party was throwing the tree out from the balcony! We always did that - everyone did, party or no party, and then the street cleaners took care of it, I suppose. At least we never bothered about what happened to it after we had hauled it out, and since the streets were not littered with trees the first half of January this is what must have happened. But it is so absurd that my children hardly believe me when I tell them. In fact, I hardly believe myself.

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    1. That's amazing! what lovely details, and what a surprise about the flats. There is definitely a nice tale to tell about the different traditions around the world - don't you think a nice photo book with different celebrations and details?

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    2. It also used to be common to serve, not a boar's head, but a whole pig's head, nicely dressed, a spread of different kinds of pork: Ham, ribs, different kinds of sausages, pork in aspic, liver paté, etc. Because by Christmas there was no more fresh food to be had and the pig was starting to lose weight, so it was time for slaughter. The pork dishes are served with different kinds of cabbage, the only available vegetablöe at that ytime of year.

      I recently read a book by Alexander McCall Smith (of "No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" fame) called "The Novel Habits of Happiness". (He does have a flair for titles!) IThe main character, Isabel Dalhousie, quotes somebody saying that nationalism is really just an allegiance to the foods you ate as a child. The example in this case is Marmite, which you probably have to have been born in the British Isles to appreciate. I was thinking when I wrote the above, that it would also be possible to state that nationalism is an allegiance to the way you celebrated Christmas as a child.

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    3. Darn it, a whole sentence disappeared. It should say: "... a whole pig's head, nicely dressed, as part of the Christmas smörgåsbord. Christmas dinner in Sweden consists of a spread… (And didn't spell "vegetable" with a Swedish ö!) I'm too trigger happy for my own good.

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    4. Thanks for all that Birgitta - fascinating, and sounds most appealing to me, a great carnivore. But a very good point about foods, celebrations and nationalities. I think the cheap sweets we grew up with are one thing that can't be replaced or matched: I find American Hersheys chocolate horrible, while I love Cadbury's Dairy Milk. Both are cheap sweet filler chocolates, not to be compared with the real deal, but they do divide our two nations.
      And it is true that when you are abroad for Christmas you try to recreate, rather than adopting your new country's ways. I remember driving around Seattle looking for the accoutrements of a British Christmas - crackers (the decorative sort, not for cheese) and mincemeat...

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  5. Interesting that you discovered Queen's The Finishing Stroke after the Guardian article. I still haven't read that yet but definitely will. Twelfth Nights sound like lovely celebrations.

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    1. I know! It was annoying. But glad I read it, however late! And we should all have more parties in the depths of winter when we need cheering up...

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