The English carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas" is a cumulative song, in which each verse builds upon the last, detailing the increasingly elaborate gifts that a "true love" has given to the singer. This popular holiday tune – known for its lords a-leaping and french hens – has many variations and refers to the real-life festive Christian season that celebrates the Nativity.
Henry V of Shakespearean fame, hosted a feast that offered 40 different types of fish, including roast porpoise.
For the month-long fast of Advent, Christians in medieval Europe would abstain from drink, meat and rich foods, denying themselves worldly comfort to seek God for life and sustenance. But beginning on Dec. 25, they would be amply rewarded for their temperance with 12 days of feasting, carousing and occasional hooliganism to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, a date unrecorded in the scripture but established by the early Church after centuries of scholarly wrangling.
Contrary to popular myth, the designation of Dec. 25 was not just a lazy attempt to steal pagan fun from the Romans. Several treatises from the first millennia A.D. pinpointed the birth of Jesus to that date based on biblical inferences and calendrical math, long before writers like Dionysius Syrus suggested that Dec. 25 was chosen for more practical reasons. Syrus was among many scholars who might have believed Jan. 6 to be the true date of Jesus' birth — while they might have lost the debate, that day, known as Epiphany, came to mark the end of 12 festive days that are Christian in its foundation, and yet also bear heavy echoes from a pre-Christian past.
Read on to learn how to celebrate the Twelve Days of Christmas as people would have many centuries ago, celebrating the universality of embracing light in the dead of winter with Jesus in their minds as the pivot of the world.
Intemperate feasting
Medieval Christians were supposed to fast all the way until Dec. 25, which would be heralded by a candlelit Midnight Mass. The degree of ensuing decadence would depend on one's social status, but everyone, in theory, benefited from festive largesse. Princes and the high nobility took the opportunity to gorge themselves and their courtiers on heaps of food that often included exotic and rarely consumed delicacies. In 1387, Richard II of England's kitchens prepared, among other ingredients, 84 pounds of salt venison, 210 geese, 1,200 pigeons and 11,000 eggs. Thirty years later, his second cousin, Henry V of Shakespearean fame, hosted a feast that offered 40 different types of fish, including roast porpoise (which is admittedly, in our modern scientific classification, a mammal).
Meanwhile, peasants and poorer urban workers could expect to receive at least 12 days' worth of relief from the usual labors, which in itself may have been as much cause to celebrate as the birth of their savior. While they would not have feasted on porpoise, a goose or pig would have been heartily consumed in a time when meat was too expensive for most people to eat regularly. Alongside meat, people ate pies, puddings and frumenty – a sweet porridge made with wheat, eggs, milk and sugar. Sometimes, the manor lord or guild masters would provide at least one meal for all of their workers, a practice perhaps emulated by the modern-day workplace pizza party.
Feasting did not relent after Christmas. On Dec. 27 lay the Feast of St. John, who was said to have drank a cup of poisoned wine without succumbing. Naturally, people commemorated this miracle by imbibing copious amounts of wine, or for the lower classes, beer or cider.
Throughout the Twelve Days, people shared traditional mince pies with friends and family, eating a mixture within that contained 13 ingredients representing Christ and his apostles. Those ingredients typically included dried fruits, spices, meats and most importantly, chopped mutton to remember the shepherds who paid homage to Jesus in the cradle.
While some people today might enjoy a Yule Log made from sponge cake and buttercream, the modern-day dessert is derived from a largely faded tradition of burning a huge, specially selected log of wood in a hearth to mark the winter solstice and symbolize the twigs the shepherds used to keep Jesus warm. In parts of Italy where the logs were particularly revered, households would decorate their ceppo di Natale and drizzle it with spices, wine or honey before setting a blaze that would be maintained until the Twelfth Night (Jan. 5 would make 12 nights including the night of the 24th), the evening before Epiphany, the last of the Twelve Days and a feast celebrating the visit of the Magi (three kings) to Jesus.
One of the most important items of an English noble's Epiphany feast was the cooked head of a giant boar, the ferocious sovereign of the forest whose slaying in a hunt represented the triumph of Christ Child over sin. Not everyone could afford a boar's head or go hunting for one, of course, so lesser burghers had to make do with pies or cakes in the shape of one while the poorest didn't bother with it at all.
Upending social hierarchies
While monks and guild actors performed dramatic retellings of biblical stories year-round, the plays were most frequent during Christmastide. Plays performed on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec. 28) invariably commemorated the story of King Herod ordering the execution of all male children in Bethlehem under two years old. One of the oldest of these plays was the "Ordo Rachelis" ("The Play of Rachel"), which centered on the titular matriarch of the Hebrews lamenting the children's death as a representation of all the Hebrew mothers of Bethlehem. Another, the "Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors," included the hauntingly mournful "Conventry Carol," a mother's lullaby to her doomed child.
Other activities on the Feast of Innocents, varying in practice across Europe, were relatively less sedate. In Germany emerged so-called "Herod games" in which people would reportedly stage mock attacks on churches and assail bystanders with inflated animal bladders to ridicule the cruel absurdity of the Judean king.
The more well-documented tradition of this day was the election of a choirboy by his peers to perform the duties of bishop, dressing in his vestments and conducting Church services in a reversal of hierarchy. (Sometimes, the boy bishop would hold "authority" from Dec. 6, Saint Nicholas' Day.) More than representing a kind of penance towards children, the tradition of the boy bishop also paid homage to the idea that God favored the poor and innocent — at the moment of deposuit potentes de sede ("he hath put down the mighty from their seat") in the liturgy, the bishop would step down, and the boy would take his place at et exaltavit humiles ("and hath exalted the humble and meek").
More voluntary role-swapping took place on the Feast of the Circumcision (Jan. 1), in which the sub-deacons, members of the lower clergy, would preside over the the day's observances and celebrate the biblical principle that “God chose what is foolish in the world, that he might put to shame them that are wise." By the 12th century, the day came to be known initially in southern France and later in other parts of Europe as the "Feast of the Fools," an occasion for much drinking, parades, dancing and disorderly merriment. The Lord of Misrule, normally a sub-deacon or a lay commoner, was appointed by lot to direct the entertainments, and like other Christmas traditions found close parallel to the Roman festival of Saturnalia, in which people enjoyed a day of drunken revelry and patricians served food to their slaves.
This kind of sanctioned social revolution, of course, only marked the beginning of a year in which normal social hierarchies remained in place — but even this was too much for some rulers and church authorities, who tried by the 15th century were attempting to ban the practice with limited success.
Exchanging gifts
While Christmas trees were not widespread until the 16th century, churches and households sometimes hung branches of holly on their doors or apples on trees to commemorate Adam and Eve Day on Dec. 24. Wrapping gifts, placing them under trees and opening them on Christmas Day are a relatively modern invention — in early medieval times, some Christian rulers thought that the story of the three Magi bestowing gifts to their sovereign, Jesus the King of Kings, was a perfect justification to demand additional taxes and tribute from their own subjects.
By the 12th century, however, the growing influence of the Church and its demands for secular rulers to abide by Christian virtues meant that gift-giving largely took the form of providing alms and food for the poor. Charity was encouraged throughout the year, and all but obliged on the Feast of St. Stephen (Dec. 26), on which the famously charitable St. Wenceslas, later immortalized in a Victorian carol, was said to have trekked through a blizzard to provide firewood for a poor man despite his own kingly status. Like other saints, he served as a lesson for good Christians to observe biblical principles that he represented in life — in this case, to love and care for the poor.
The kind of gift-giving that most people are familiar with now — exchanges between friends and family — typically occurred among upper and middle class folk on New Year's Day, with a prince or lord typically receiving his own tribute in state, servants at hand to display them on sideboards after the presentation. This was an opportunity for subjects to please their lord with valuable and novel items, like the £30,000 gold cups that Cardinal Thomas Wolsey presented to Henry VIII of England almost annually, or, on at least one occasion, for a rebellious vassal to lull him into a false sense of security. Unfortunately for the Duke of Buckingham, his 1521 gift of a goblet engraved with the motto "With humble, true heart" did not do the trick, and he was executed the same year for high treason.
Sometimes, Henry enjoyed receiving more personal gifts, like his daughter Lady Elizabeth's Latin translation of Queen Katherine Parr's "Prayers and Meditations." The future Queen Elizabeth I was 12 years old at the time — long past the age in which a ghastly crayon drawing of dad would suffice.