Merchants
have turned the 12 days of Christmas on their head, with popular culture -- movies
and ads – depicting the 12 days preceding the holiday as the most important
times to express consideration and get busy with that shopping. Traditionally, The 12 days of Christmas
follow the birth of the child Jesus. It took the Three Wise Men – shadowy
figures from East of Palestine – that long to reach Bethlehem after the star appeared
to guide them on the so-called Holy Night.
This
night was fixed at December 24 to co-opt the pagan rituals. In early times of
winter celebration, feasting in the lord’s castle or the village continued
until Jan. 5, the Feast of Epiphany or Little Christmas as it was called in the
ethnic community where I was raised. On this night, the myth holds, the Wise
Men reached Bethlehem to complete the cycle of rejoicing following the birth of
the new king.
12 Nights of Socializing
In
my father’s extended family, and my mother’s smaller local family, there was
much visiting in the evenings during the 12 nights of Christmas. The men
returned from work, generally factory or crafts jobs; the family had dinner.
Then the children were bundled into snowsuits, and we set off in the dark,
chill night on icy streets. Or relatives might ring the bell about the time we were finishing cleaning up after supper.
In
that case, we children were expected to allow ourselves to be hugged, answer
questions civilly, open any gifts in the presence of the givers, and say “thank
you” as sincerely as we could manage as kids, no matter what our personal
opinions might be. Then we might go to our rooms, which were not equipped with
televisions. A television was a
space-consuming piece of furniture and the focus of the living room. Even radio
was not available until my teens, when cheap Japanese transistors came into
widespread, affordable use.
The Social Protocols
Certain
visits were obligatory. Visits to grandparents and/or get-togethers with
siblings occurred on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Less close connections
were attended to during the week. Nieces and nephews were expected to visit
their aunts and uncles, bringing the children to meet the great-aunts and -uncles. Godparents had to be visited, or the godparent might visit the child’s
home. There didn’t seem to be a pecking order on that. In general, it was
expected that families with young children and older people were less mobile,
so they would be visited. Younger people visiting older ones showed
respect.
Conversation typically centered on family. Conversations included keeping track of marriages and
– rare in those times, divorces -- as well as births, illnesses, children’s
education and antics, and gossip about mutual acquaintances. In addition to
information sharing, one conversational ploy was known as fishing. Direct questions about many things were rude. If
one suspected that a woman had died her hair to cover the gray, or someone’s
child was getting into trouble, one might volunteer some information that would
anticipate a similar self-disclosure from the other person. If I wanted to know
if cousin Holly’s child was failing in school, I might volunteer that one of my
children was struggling with math or English or some such. Inquiry could be
deflected by focusing solely on the inquisitor’s situation: “I am sorry to hear
it.”
Circles of Friends in the Seventies
As a young woman, there was a lot of visiting
among friends during the holiday season. This was accompanied with capacious
quantities of wine, weed, and great food. A few businesses even gave a paid
break week for the days between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. The feeling
was not a whole lot of work would be done anyway. Many business places
were looser about hours, especially if business was a bit off. In the newspaper business, for example,
Christmas was often a famine period. This was before our nation celebrated national
holidays with shootings, and before celebrity gossip and local police blotter
stuff was elevated to the status of news worth anyone’s time. Congress and most
state legislatures are on break, and once upon a time in the United States,
political coverage constituted a good part of what was considered news. A phenomenon such as the Kardashians was not
even a gleam in the cameras’ eyes.
Now, however, the 12 days of Christmas have fallen on hard times. What was once a
joyful period of carousing during the darkest nights of the year has become an
excuse for employers to model themselves on Scrooge and fire employees who
prefer to spend time with family on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas or Hanukkah,
or Passover or Eid, or Diwali, or whatever occasion might be of sacred
importance to that worker.
The
12 days of Christmas, a time for opening one’s heart to an ever widening sphere
of people with food, conversation, and drink, is simply a marketing ploy. And it's too bad that advertising analysis co-opts ancient cultural roots, simultaneously pretending to honor them while subverting the social and cultural practices toward a calculus of endless consumerism.
