January 6: So much more than the final day of Christmas

To most of us, it’s the day when you have to take down the festive decorations. But, says Ian Marchant, there’s more to Twelfth Night than that – and for one tiny Scottish island it’s Christmas Day itself

THERE has always seemed to me something magical about the time between New Year and Twelfth Night. All of the stresses of Christmas have gone. All the excesses of New Year have been forgotten, if not always forgiven. The fridge still has bits of nice things you can pick at, the charity shops are open again, so you can pass off the jumper your Auntie gave you, and you’re still a few days away from having to worry about vacuuming up all those pine needles that have dropped into the carpet.

Summoned to London to take part in a radio interview on 3 January, I was struck by the almost total disappearance of Christmas. If it seems cynical that shops put Christmas goods on the shelf in August, and put up their decorations in October, it seems to me equally cynical to take the decorations down on Boxing Day. Because Christmas has 12 days, and has had since it was decreed by the Council of Tours in 567. Christmas ain’t over till the 12 lords leap.

While the British see Twelfth Night simply as the time the decorations need to come down, it is still celebrated in much of Europe as a major festival. In Spain, for example, it is known as Dia de los Reyes (Three Kings Day), which is when Spanish people traditionally exchange gifts. It is Epiphany, after all, the Christian Feast which celebrates the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child. In many churches, Epiphany is when the priest blesses the holy water, and chalks the initials of the Magi over the door of the church, that it might be kept safe. There are lots of spirits to be kept safe from; Twelfth Night is second only to Hallowe’en as a time when the barriers are down between this world and the next. In Norse mythology it was the night Odin undertook his Wild Ride, and the air clamoured with the cries of pagan gods. In Bulgaria, men dance in icy waters playing the bagpipes to keep spirits away. Best to leave the night to the spirits and the bag-pipers, stay indoors and make merry.

One of the main ways that people made merry on Twelfth Night was by eating cake. As a person who is perhaps too fond of cake, this seems to me a very good thing. Twelfth cakes would contain a bean, and sometimes a pea. Whoever found the bean in their cake would be crowned King for the night; and whoever found the pea would be their Queen. The Royals-for-the-Night would have been in charge of the revels, which folklorists have suggested is a survival from Saturnalia, the Roman festival when the slaves became the masters for the night. At the University of St Andrews, a minute dated from 1430 mentions the robes to be worn by the “Rex ffabe” (King of the Bean) and his attendants. Mary, Queen of Scots was present at a Twelfth Day feast at Holyrood in 1563, at which there was no King but Mary Fleming (one of Mary’s ladies) was chosen as Queen of the Bean and wore silver robes and jewels to preside over the evening.

Samuel Pepys was an aficionado of Twelfth Night cake. In 1668 he paid 20 shillings for the ingredients of his cake, which was a lot of money in those days. He was less keen on Shakespeare’s eponymous play, which he described as “silly, and not related at all to the name or the night”. Literary critics, however, have come to disagree, and see Twelfth Night as a play about role reversal (Viola dressed as a man, for example, or Malvolio’s dreams of becoming noble), which exactly fits with the idea of slaves becoming masters. So attractive was this idea that vast quantities of Twelfth Night Cake were sold well into the 19th century, when it seems to have moved over to the day itself, while the tradition of the bean has turned into finding a silver sixpence in the Christmas pud. Black Bun, now one of the treats of Hogmanay, also started life on the Twelfth.

If the authentic cake survives at all, it is at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, where on Twelfth Night the cast and crew of the latest production enjoy a slice of Baddeley Cake. Richard Baddeley was a one-time cook and subsequently an actor who, in 1794, left £100 in his will to provide a Twelfth Night cake for the enjoyment of the Green Room. The tradition continues in the shape of a highly decorated cake which each year is made to celebrate the current production – in 2012, the cast are eating Shrek the Musical cake.

This Twelfth Night is exciting for me, because I’m throwing a launch party for my new book, Something of the Night. On the invitations, I blithely promised Twelfth cake, without being entirely sure what I meant by it.

Research by the cake maker (aka my wife) reveals that the cake would have been a rich fruit cake which differs from the straightforward Christmas variety in that it is leavened by yeast. In a nod to the Baddeley cake, she’s decorating it with icing the colour of the night, sprinkled with edible silver, which, I’m hoping, will provide my annual requirement.

It’s not as easy as you might imagine to say for sure exactly when Twelfth Night falls. Strictly speaking (and you’re going to have to pay quite close attention here), in medieval usage “night” meant the night before the day, which is to say, Twelfth Night really falls on the night of the Fifth of January, rather than on the day of the Sixth, which we now call Twelfth Night.

If Twelfth Night is exciting for me, it is nothing compared to one tiny corner of Scottish territory, where Twelfth Night is actually Christmas Day. On Foula, the most remote inhabited island of the Shetlands, they never went along with the swap from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which the rest of Scotland adopted in 1752. This means that really, if Foula kept to the old Julian calendar, their Christmas Day would fall on the Fifth. But on Foula they refused to recognise the leap year of 1900, which means that they celebrate Christmas Day on the Sixth which, to the rest of us, is Twelfth Night, except that it isn’t. You’ve got to hand it to a community of 30 people who are bloody minded enough to stick to their guns for over 250 years in the face of overwhelming opposition. At least there is no shop on Foula, so they haven’t had to put up with Christmas decorations any longer than the rest of us.

Shetland as a whole didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until the 19th century, which meant they kept their Christmas Day on the Fifth, because they weren’t so fussy about the Leap Year as they are on Foula. Twenty-fourth Day was important to Shetlanders and it still is, because it roughly coincides with the celebration of Up Helly Aa. Just to add another layer of confusion, in some, but not all, countries which partake in the Orthodox communion (Russia yes, Greece no), Christmas Day falls on the Seventh. And the Armenian Church celebrates Christmas on 19 January, which means that Twelfth Night is on … er … no, sorry, I’ve run out of fingers.

If Twelfth Night signals the end of Christmas, you could feel that you’ve run out of excuses not to get back to work. If this makes you feel gloomy, let me offer a crumb of comfort. In pre-modern times, no-one actually went back to work until the day after Plough Monday, which was the first Monday after Twelfth Night. This year, that’s not until Tuesday the Tenth. I might just kick back for a few more days yet, and eat some cake.