Epiphany – Thursday, 6th January

Wednesday 5th is the day to take down and remove your Christmas decorations – the Twelfth Night.  According to the first tradition, those who fail to remember to remove their Christmas decorations on Epiphany Eve must leave them untouched until Candlemas (2nd February), the second opportunity to remove them; failure to observe this custom is considered inauspicious. Other Christian countries historically remove them on Candlemas, the conclusion of Epiphanytide.

Other popular Epiphany customs include:

• Chalking the Door: either on Twelfth Night (5th January), the twelfth day of Christmastide and eve of the feast of the Epiphany, or on Epiphany Day (6th January) itself, many Christians (including Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians and Roman Catholics, among others) write on their doors with chalk in a pattern such as 20 ✝ C ✝ M ✝ B ✝ 22, with the numbers referring “to the calendar year (20 and 22, for instance, for this year, 2022); the crosses stand for Christ; and the letters have a two-fold significance: C, M and B are the initials for the traditional names of the Magi (Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar), but they are also an abbreviation of the Latin blessing Christus mansionem benedicat, which means, May Christ bless this house.“
• Having one’s house blessed – contact Rev. Jo 🙂
• Epiphany singing: Star singers also known as Epiphany singers, or Star boys’ singing procession (England), are children and young people walking from house to house with a star on a rod and often wearing crowns and dressed in clothes to resemble the Three Magi.  Nowadays, it is not only boys who sing and they no longer go from house to house.
• Consuming Three Kings Cake: now replaced with Christmas cake, it was frequently baked witho a bean hidden in one side and a pea hidden in the other; the man/lord finding the bean became King for the night, while the woman/lady finding the pea became the Queen – also known as the Lord or Lady of Misrule. Earlier, in the time of Shakespeare, there was only a Lord of Misrule, chosen by the hidden bean, reflected in Shakespeare’s play ‘Twelfth Night‘.
• Winter swimming: Typically outdoors or in an unheated pool.
• Attending Church services – please visit HERE for more information.

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