"Endeavor to persevere!"

The Twelve Days of Christmas…

When I was a boy, my Mother didn’t put our Christmas tree ‘up’ until Christmas Eve.  Then, it seemed as though we worked all day decorating it…she was partial to those old time leaded icicles and she hung them one at a time so that when she was finished, our tree looked like a shimmering waterfall of ice…

She didn’t use a lot of lights, people didn’t back then…not like today when people hang hundreds of twinkling LED’s…matter of fact, when I was a boy,  there   were people who  just didn’t use lights at all…My Aunt Billie was one of those…I think it was because my Uncle Fred was deathly afraid of fire…

Back in those ‘Golden Oldies’, there were people who still lit their Christmas Tree with real candles so there was always news of Christmas fires…as I recall, Christmas candles were similar to the birthday candles of today only fatter…short ’n fat…the funny thing is I c’n remember seeing them on a tree but I can’t for the life of me recall how they were fastened to the tree…

But back to the Twelve Days of Christmas because I’ve been told by…oh, any number of people that while they’ve heard the phrase and they’ve heard of ‘Olde Christmas’ they don’t really know what it means…

It has to do with the combination of the Julian calendar and the Georgian calendar and the Feast of the Epiphany and the gaggle of human mem’ries over the centuries…

January sixth is, or was, considered Old Christmas…or sometimes, Little Christmas and, in my Mother’s mind, at least, the twelve days of Christmas that she (and we) celebrated began on Christmas Day and lasted through the sixth of January after which she took down the tree…

Traditions come and go, and change over the years…some people want their Christmas tree up and decorated the day after Thanksgiving…obviously this must be an American thing because the rest of the world doesn’t celebrate American thanksgiving…

It’s a pretty good stretch from Thanksgiving to Christmas and what we like to call ‘live’ trees get really, really dry and dangerous so a lot of people take them down the first opportunity after Christmas…Heck, I recall back in the ‘60s ’n ‘70s people tossing the trees out on Christmas Day…

Now, we have a lot of artificial trees…pretty good ones…look real…with hundreds of sparkling lights…they don’t really need a lot of decorations but most families have boxes of beloved Christmas ornaments that they drag out from their hidey holes just for the occasion…and they buy more every year so that’s a tradition that’s going to be around for awhile, you can bet your local retailers collective butts on that…

Anyhow, the twelve days of Christmas seems to be one of those traditions that is well on its way to oblivion but it’s a small thing in the overall scheme…

Christmas, over the years that I’ve been an observer, has morphed from just being a Christian celebration into something much more secularized, much more commercial, sort of a return, I guess, to the pagan celebration of the winter solstice that the Catholic church ‘wedded’ to the birth of Jesus in their search for converts (or so I’ve been told)…

All holidays change with time…when I was a boy, the 4th of July was actually the biggest holiday of the year, in mid-summer, lasting several weeks with picnics and fireworks and parades and speeches and did I mention, fireworks…

Halloween was basically just for children and the pumpkin Jack O’ Lanterns here in the USA were carved out of turnips in Ireland where they were born…

Christmas wasn’t the biggest Christian holiday either…that was reserved for Easter…and I’m pretty sure that the chocolate bunnies were born in the 20th century…

Anyhow, in my Christmas story, I got the Red Ryder gun when I was nine years old ’n living in Beattyville ’n over the years since, the Christmas trees that I picture in my memory are the ones spent in that little river village so long ago….

I do hope 2017 will be a good year for the world and for all my friends…Justin Other Smith