The twelfth day

Epiphany also provides a final flourish to the long celebration of Christmas. Or at least it should. It was known, in the old days in England, as ‘Twelfth Night’, indicating how many evenings’ feasting there had been until this last and rowdiest celebration arrived. Shakespeare even wrote a play to be performed that evening. But in Britain now Epiphany is an almost forgotten feast. Christians still recognise it but it isn’t celebrated in society at large. This isn’t really because Christmas festivities have become shorter. We still have a long party, but in Britain it both begins and finishes earlier than it used to in olden times, starting with office gettogethers and school discos in the week before Christmas and ending with the celebra-tion of the New Year a week after it.
So Christmas has already been finished for some time by the time the arrival of the Wise Men is celebrated. Our society has its mind on other things. I myself have already returned to normality with relief. The children have gone back to school, my husband has gone back to work. After all the presents and preparation and eating and seeing relatives we are concentrat-ing on cerebral things again – school work and lesson preparation and writ-ing articles for the Messenger of St Anthony. Last year, having failed to find time before Christmas to take my youngest to see the Christmas decorations in the local shopping centre, I promised I would take her after. Epiphany used to be the time everyone took down their holly and tinsel. ‘You’ll have the devil in the house if you leave it longer than that’ my grandmother used to say. But when we went to the shopping centre on the third of January there wasn’t a single decoration. Every shred of glitter or greenery had been stripped away and the place was teeming with people intent on finding bargains in the winter sales.

One response to secularism by religious groups in this country is to band together as a community and look in-wards as much as they look outwards. Thus Orthodox Jews in certain parts of London concentrate hard on a liturgical calendar with many specifically Jewish feasts that help bind their community together. The same is true of many Muslim or Hindu groups. Catholics in this country used to do the same, celebrating many saints’ days that protestant churches disregarded and emphasising their own customs, like wearing mantillas to mass, that marked them out. My own mother, for example, always insisted that we make the sign of the cross when we said morning prayers in our protestant school – hugely embarrassed but attempting to be obedient, we would try to do so very, very quickly before anyone else opened their eyes. This makes me laugh now, but I also feel a little irritation, knowing that it wasn’t genuine religious feeling that motivated my mother’s awkward command but the rather more questionable belief that we should stand up for who we were. Nevertheless, I was also a child of the second Vatican council. My father was a Protestant and I remember the relief and joy in our household that greeted the Church’s new openness towards other Christian Churches. At last we were allowed to go occasionally with my father to church! And join in Harvest Festival at school! Gradually my father’s complaints that his wife’s Catholic relations made him feel they formed a club he could never join ceased. By the end of his life he and my mother attended an ecumenical prayer group together. They remained grieved that he was not allowed to take communion in a Catholic church but Vatican II had nevertheless made all the difference to their spiritual and emotional lives.

Growing up in this atmosphere has, I think, left me with a legacy of suspicion for all sectarianism. My own husband is Jewish – though not practising and though I very much want my children to be Christians I try to emphasise the links between the two religions and allow my husband’s family and friends to give the children some understanding of their Jewish heritage. And I want them to grow up with a knowledge of people from other religions too. We live in a very multi-cultural part of London and this is not difficult. But resisting sectarianism does make it much more difficult in the modern world to resist secularism as well. I do not have the strong buttresses of community and custom which prop up, for example, Orthodox Jewish congregations against the modern world. Our parish is active and the children have friends at Mass with whom they play whilst the adults drink coffee afterwards. But they also have other friends elsewhere who go to Church of England services or Baptist ones or to a mosque or synagogue – or who, more likely, never go near any place of worship at all. And the other Catholics I know, though they may, unlike me, send their children to Catholic schools, also want to live in a modern, multi-cultural world. We may lament the secularism that is a growing part of that world, but we don’t want to reject that world entirely. To do so, in fact, seems deeply unchristian.
So swayed by my children’s insistence, I allow the Christmas decorations in our house to go up far earlier than they ever did in my own childhood. In fact, I have decided that I like this – after all, it is Advent and how better to express our excitement in waiting for Christ to be born than in making our homes look bright? But, until the 6^th of January, I certainly shan’t allow the children to take those decorations down. As an individual family, at the very least, we will remember that this day has been set aside to celebrate the Wise Men’s part in Christmas. I’m afraid, however, that we won’t manage a party.