On the twelfth day of Christmas....

Did you take your decorations down last night? Good for you. But did you refer to it as "twelfth night"? Well, you were wrong. Somewhere along the line, two things have become confused. Back in medieval times Christmas was a twelve day "do". Christmas Day itself was a holy day - you went to church, confessed your sins, sat at home and read the Bible - but starting on the next day (what now we call Boxing Day) you had twelve days of merrymaking. So the twelve days of Christmas ran from December 26th to January 6th, and twelfth night - your last chance for a knees-up - was the evening of January 6th. Quite independently of this, the Church celebrated (and still does) January 6th as the Feast of Epiphany, and as the Christmas decorations in the churches would be looking a bit tired by then, it was decided that churches should be redecorated for Epiphany, and so following the final service on January 5th, the Christmas decorations would be taken down, and that's where the idea that we should do the same with our house decorations came from. But somebody, sometime made the fatal error of connecting the two ideas, and calling this "twelfth night", which it ain't - it's actually eleventh night. So you still have a day of carousing to go!