So, Christmas is over and we are about to embrace the New Year.

What is next before February Imbolc ?

Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night refers to the twelfth night of Christmas, also referred to as the eve of Epiphany, a day that commemorates the visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus and is often celebrated with a temporary suspension of rules and social orders.

Twelfth Night (also known as Epiphany Eve) is a festival on the last night of the Twelve Days of Christmas, marking the coming of the Epiphany. Different traditions mark the date of Twelfth Night as either 5 January or 6 January, depending on whether the counting begins on Christmas Day or 26 December.

A superstition in some English-speaking countries suggests it is unlucky to leave Christmas decorationshanging after Twelfth Night.

In medieval and Tudor England, Candlemas traditionally marked the end of the Christmas season, although later, Twelfth Night came to signal the end of Christmastide, with a new but related season of Epiphanytide running until Candlemas.

Food and drink are the centre of the celebrations in modern times. All of the most traditional ones go back many centuries. The punch called wassail is consumed especially on Twelfth Night and throughout Christmas time, especially in the UK, and door-to-door wassailing (similar to singing Christmas carols) was common up until the 1950s.

Around the world, special pastries, such as the tortell and king cake, are baked on Twelfth Night, and eaten the following day for the Feast of the Epiphany celebrations. In English and French custom, the Twelfth-cake was baked to contain a bean and a pea so that those who received the slices containing them should be respectively designated king and queen of the night’s festivities.

Twelfth Night and Epiphany mark the start of the Carnivalseason, which lasts through Mardi Gras Day.

Twelfth Night is the twelfth night after Christmas, the last night of what used to be the extended period of celebration of the Christmas season. Thus it marks the boundary between the time for games and disguisings and the business of the workaday world.

Fires were lit in the fields and revellers would go from door to door playing practical jokes on their neighbours. Also known as the Feast of Fools, Twelfth Night marked the end of the festive period and, in echoes of the ancient Roman mid-winter festival of Saturnalia, in which social order was reversed, it gave everyone the chance to dispense with normal conventions. 

What followed was an evening of misrule in which everything was turned upside down, even gender roles, and where rules had to be obeyed, however ridiculous.

Twelfth Night festivities were not your grandma’s Christmas parties. They were hugely raucous and full of drinking and mischief-making. One tradition was for men to dress up as women, and women to dress up as men, and for servants and masters to switch roles for a short time. 

On this night the Lord of Misrule is supposed to turn everything upside down and kings become peasants and vice versa.

Topsy Turvy Day is celebrated on January 6th every year and is also known as the feast of fools.

At its heart, though, the Feast of Fools always turned power on its head—a reversal that naturally made church leaders very nervous.

The Lord of Misrule symbolizes the world turning upside down with the coming of a cold winter. 

Twelfth Night, Holly Night, was the last big blowout of the season. It was customary to carry one or more flaming branches of holly through the town accompanied by a loud band and fireworks.

Twelfth Night is an excellent time to disperse stagnant energy and to upend rigid customs.

Spend this day doing things out of the ordinary, and see what epiphany it brings you.