On the Twelfth Day of Christmas…

Ah, here we are–Twelfth Night! The crazy Americans, as represented by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), have screwed up the whole 12 days of Christmas thing because Twelfth Night also is called Epiphany Eve. Tomorrow is Epiphany…except in the United States because hey, it’s more convenient to celebrate it on a Sunday and there’s a Sunday the day after so…. They do this every year. Last year Epiphany was on January 8th. In 2022 it was on January 2nd, an exceedingly horrible choice because we were just 8 or 9 days into Christmastide when it occurred. It seems to me–though no one consults me in these matters–that if one wants to insist on celebrating Advent (not Christmas) in the leadup to December 25th, then one ought to celebrate Epiphany on its appropriate day, January 6th, regardless of the day of the week. It’s important because of the Twelve Days of Christmas, i.e., Christmastide. It shortchanges Christmas to stick with the full leadup to it (Advent) only to cut more than half a week off of it for convenience’s sake. It’s not like the church doesn’t celebrate certain dates no matter where they fall: Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary; Immaculate Conception of the BVM; Ash Wednesday. Our parish just celebrated our feast day, The Most Holy Name of Jesus, on Wednesday–where it belongs.

According to the USCCB, tomorrow is a “Christmas Weekday”. Not in Twelvetide, unless you’re Orthodox. Maybe they’re just giving back one of the days stolen in previous years?

Twelfth Night has various traditions including eating king cake, chalking the door (with a set of religious symbols intended to bless all who enter during the year–see photo below), singing carols, and of course, in some countries, going to church. It’s been considered unlucky to leave Christmas decorations up past Twelfth Night, but I tend to favor Epiphany for this. I base this on the idea that Epiphany celebrates when the three kings, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, visited the Christ Child who still resided in a manger in Bethlehem (according to our tradition). Still, if I adhere to the superstition, not removing the decorations by sundown tomorrow (or tonight if we’re going to strictly observe Jan 6th as Epiphany) means we have to leave them up until Candlemas which occurs on Feb 2nd. That would be overmuch, don’t you think?

We chalked the doors at the start of 2020. In our local tradition, the initials for three kings was placed in the middle of the year. As you can see, we’ve not been real good at keeping up the tradition. January 2020.

If you’ve followed all of these entries, you have my sympathy. After Epiphany I will return to more poetry, essays, and photography.

On the Eleventh Day of Christmas…

…gave to me…we’re going with drummers drumming which have occupied ninth through twelfth places in all versions of the past century. In 1980 I attended a Japanese Festival at the Seattle Center. The highlight for me occurred with a show of taiko drumming which had been preceded with a film about the religious origins of the drumming-based music. It’s impossible to describe it other than to say it was a lot of drumming.

Small and medium-sized taiko drums with drummers. Seattle, 1980.

Largest taiko drum with two drummers who do not always beat the same rhythm if I recall correctly. Seattle 1980.

On the Tenth Day of Christmas…

[I was too exhausted to post anything, so I’m making it up this ~~morning~~ evening…]

…sent to me…let’s see…”pipers piping”…(sigh)

Today brought out my darker side of anger, depression, and fear for my health. Or perhaps it’s a side effect from our beginning a Damp January (as opposed to Dry January which would actually less difficult than “dampness”). Regardless, when your really cool cat gets on your nerves simply because he is, after all, a cat–then you know you’re seeing some kind of stress bubbling out of the nearest weak point like magma seeks a weakness in the earth’s crust. I think many of us who blog have at least a small mental-health reason for doing so. I tell you things as I would a psychotherapist. In doing so I see myself, I discover things about myself, and it’s cheaper than engaging the real thing. (What do they do anyway? “How did this make you feel?” Really? I would like to think they’re like a baseball hitting coach: they say little of note except “attaboy” and “you really caught that one!” until with just one deft comment they say, “hey, are you dropping your lead shoulder a little more on purpose?”)

But to continue our theme: we are now one day behind and the pipers piping remind me of my days at Shadle Park High School in Spokane, WA. Our mascot was the Highlander. Our marching band wore kilts plus those cool tight jackets up top over white shirts and ties, and the drum majors (maybe the whole band?) wore sporrans which are those horsehair things that hang in front of the kilt and seemed designed to keep the front from flying up in the breeze. Our drum majors wore those incredibly tall, fuzzy hats on their heads. And we had bagpipers…piping.

I co-edited the newspaper in my senior year. I also edited one section of the yearbook, and when I couldn’t get a good [expletive] photo from the photography staff, I bought a 35mm and became a photographer myself. I had a period for each, which meant half my day was spent in the journalism room. Seniors only had two required classes anyway, a couple of social studies type classes spread over the two semesters, and English. Like many college-bound seniors, I took Senior Humanities which combined the Current World Problems/World Geography classes with English to give us a more challenging venue (and to earn us advanced credit in college which now has become common but back then was innovative). We rolled with the times. 1971 segued into 1972. We looked forward to graduating as we protested the Vietnam War (or not), indulged in the licentiousness of the times (or not), frequented the rather new thing called McDonald’s (everyone), went to dances, protested the ridiculous rules which are always foisted on high school students because, frankly, adults are afraid of near-adults, and we looked forward with eager anticipation to exercising a newly-won right as citizens: we were going to vote for a president in the fall. Nixon won. Figure it out.

This is a photo of my journalism teacher at the beginning of my junior year, except I don’t have permission to use his photograph, so you’ll have to imagine a guy that looks a bit like Dickie Smothers complete with a curly-ended handlebar mustache and a page-boy haircut. The photo was taken for some kind of promo thing for the yearbook company. He left us at the end of that academic year to go teach cinema studies in Edina, MN. I stayed, dithered, took journalism, veered to creative writing, and wound up doing neither when I went to college at the end of 1972. Ah well.

Me, aged 16. Note really cool leather band for my wrist watch. Note cool floral pattern in the bands of the T-shirt. (Hell, note that I’m wearing a T-shirt at all.) Fall 1970.

On the Ninth Day of Christmas…

…oh a-dither, a-dather! Do we riff off of “pipers piping”? Or go with the 1909 version of “ladies dancing” (now moved to number 12)? Or “drummers drumming” in a competing version from 1907? Or, my personal favorite, “bears a-beating” from a 1900 version? And there are others involving other barnyard animals. It’s my little conceit, this 12-day run of posts: I’m picking the bears. I don’t have nine of them in one photo. So….

Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee side. May 2004.

Grizzly bear ponders life beneath his fountain. North Carolina Zoo, February 2006.

…and multiply by three…

On the Eighth Day of Christmas…

…it should be something to do with maids a-milking, but the only thing that got milked on my New Year’s Day was time as I tried to recover from over-celebrating New Year’s Eve on top of staying awake for about 20 hours. A formula for slow-maneuvers the next day. Let us then ponder this:

Plato’s cave wall has nothing on my hallway–or on my sense of reality yesterday. August 2023.

On the Seventh Day of Christmas…

…it turns out to be New Year’s Eve (every time), so we turn from symbolic seven’s and instead offer you up a NYE photo from the end of 2006. That’s Cole exhibiting the disdain I feel for such things as ushering out a year with a party. It’s about as logical as saying “hooray!” when you use a 12-inch ruler to measure something that’s just a bit over 12 inches or when a 10,000-meter runner completes a lap. On the other hand, any excuse for a party, right? Ours will start and end early. I just hope to catch at least an hour or two of Andy and Anderson before I conk out. I took the 7 a.m. mass as cantor this morning, so the chances of making midnight seem slim. “Blow the noisemaker, Cole! C’mon, dude, it’s a party!” (In actuality, Cole, an FIV-positive cat, was just starting his turn into poor health. Everything started failing in 2007, and he went to the catnip fields in the sky on the next NYE.)

Cole the cat. New Year’s Eve 2006 into 2007.

On the Sixth Day of Christmas…

…gave to me…six geese a-swimming…

On the Fifth Day of Christmas…

“…FIVE TA-A-A-AH-COS!” Okay, there are only three in the photo but I had five last night after wa-a-a-ay too much beer, and they were delightful.

A trio of tacos. These are shredded pork simmered in appropriate spices. Last night’s featured a ground pork picadillo. February 2023.

On the Third Day of Christmas—

—no, wait! I’m not Eastern rite. I can’t just reorient the Twelve Days to suit my fancy, even if it does seem a bit ambiguous who really counts Christmas as Day One and who doesn’t. We’re going to have to acknowledge the Fourth Day of Christmas too. Hmmmmm…..

On the Third Day of Christmas someone brought to me:

Commemorative T-shirt design for my wife’s birthday. August 2018.

When I met the woman who became my wife, I knew (vaguely) that she possessed triplet sisters. One of them sang in the choir with us, after all, and the day I got to know my wife for the first time, I also spent time with that sister and her fiancée. My new-found love interest wouldn’t let me meet her family for weeks because it’s large: one of eight children who by that point were all having children too. We’re nearing the 30th anniversary of that meeting. I’m used to the triplets now, and I like everything about them (almost–their ability to slip into a ‘triplet-speak’ that’s difficult to understand remains a bit off-putting). All three gathered on our back deck in 2018 with tiaras and T’s, firmly convinced the slogan on the front told the truth. At least it’s better than their 50th birthday slogan: “150 Years of Perfection”!

For “four” I’m going with “Four Day Creep” performed by Humble Pie on their album Performance Rockin’ The Fillmore: The Complete Recordings. I discovered this complete version this year to my delight. The original took performances from four distinct shows over two days and ‘smooshed’ them onto one album. “Four Day Creep” gets the billing here because it’s the first song of each set, there are four sets, and the song has a decidedly different treatment in each performance. Here’s one of the three other performances I experienced. Turn it up. No, really up. “upper” than that. There ya go. (you’re going to need a tissue–your ears are bleeding.)

Anecdotal backstory: my first real roommate at college–I ditched the first one–name of Motorhead, introduced me to the Humble Pie Performance album. Being from New Jersey, he had attended a Humble Pie concert. “They had these big Altec Lansing Voice of the Theatre speakers,” he said. “You know those? Just like the little ones with the two curved cuts to the front plates? These suckers were so big you could crawl inside of them…which the junkies did. The sheer volume of the bass would vibrate them out and they’d crawl back in!” Yeah. I remember stuff like that. As you listen to the song above, hopefully at a loud volume on a sound system with large speakers, imagine being inside a speaker while the songs were played.

On the Second Day of Christmas…

…brought to me, two turtles of lassitude…

Lake Lynn turtles, Raleigh, NC. October 2023.

Yep, all that celebrating is catching up with me. So many more days to go! If one simply must attend to a few bills (as I did today), at least having a good soundtrack will help. Today we had The Night The Guitars Came To Play by Micky Moody and Bernie Marsden.