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.
…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.
…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.
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.
Exiting the 2023 NC Chinese Lantern Festival. December 2023.
Yesterday four of us experienced the annual Chinese Lantern Festival at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre (which sits at the southern edge of Cary and the eastern edge of Apex in the Raleigh-Cary-Durham Triangle area). I entered with moderate expectations but left with a big appreciation for the spectacle. We purchased the “early twilight entry” tickets for a variety of reasons: chief among them being we’re old, and anything that promises an Early Bird special appeals to oldsters. We wandered for an hour, and then we fulfilled a sudden hankering for East Asian food by driving to a pan-Asian restaurant near our home.
Entrance to the festival. December 2023.Symbolic peaches. December 2023.Parasols hung from the roof of the refreshment center. December 2023.Diamonds in the “snow”. December 2023.A turtle-dragon. December 2023.Reflections in Symphony Lake. December 2023.Ice Dragon. December 2023.
I hope I didn’t post this last year, but I’m too busy to check right now. [Well, I checked a week later, and I did publish it last year just after Thanksgiving 2022…but it was edited slightly differently. Oh well.] Our friends’ family owns a place on Bogue Sound, a portion of the Intracoastal Waterway on the shores of North Carolina. When my friend is down there, he habitually walks to the end of the dock to capture the sun’s rising, no matter the time of day. Each evening he watches and captures images of it as it leaves the sky. This reminds me of a movie with Harvey Keitel (can’t remember the name of it) where every day he walks across a busy NYC street and shoots a photo of his deli to place in a growing library of scrapbooks. It’s a form of time-lapse photography, but on a different scale. In my friend’s case, I think it’s less “time-lapse” and more a capture of the moods invoked by each unique astronomical event. When I’m down there, I more or less attempt the same thing, except my body sometimes refuses to rise around 0500!
In the Roman Catholic Church tomorrow is The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. This begins the final week of the year…as far as liturgy is concerned. The new year begins with the First Sunday of Advent on December 3. This year Advent is three weeks and one day long, the shortest it can be, because the Fourth Sunday of Advent falls on Christmas Eve Day. It can be four weeks long when Christmas falls on a Sunday as it did last year. Thus the end of the year prompts a bit of reflection for me before falling into the seasonal frenzy.
All of this by way of saying too many things dance in my head this moment to make this a coherent piece of writing. One of yesterday’s posts prompted a request for more “soundtrack” postings, and I’ve decided to play with that for a little bit.
Today’s soundtrack
I’m a bass in one of the choirs at the Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral in Raleigh, NC. There’s a lot of music coming down the road right now. We’ve a special liturgy full of music coming up, Lessons and Carols, and then there is the tradition of a musical presentation preceding the Midnight Mass on December 24-25. (The music begins between 11-11:30 p.m. to make sure the mass itself begins on Christmas Day–“midnight” mass.) This year’s music packet for the choir is nearly 100 pages. I’m not telling this to brag, convert, solicit sympathy, or narrate information about the church. I’m telling you this to explain that the soundtrack began with a lot ME practicing my music!
The remainder of it has been finishing Yessongs by Yes. Released in 1973, it’s more interesting than good. Large amounts of the two-hour album are better on the studio albums where the group could overdub to its heart’s content. I’m particularly not fond of some of the improvised melodic changes. They’re just not as good as the originals they’re meant to bring to their audience. But considering the large of amount of overdubbing and the intricate work which went into making the studio albums, it’s illuminating to hear how well that is conveyed in concert.
Enough. It’s time to sip some cheer, consider stories for my annual Christmas newsletter (more on that later), and relax. For now I will leave you with an oakleaf hydrangea, a native plant in the southeastern USA (which I just learned!). Some lousy squirrels broke it off just above the ground last year because it’s almost directly under a bird feeder which they cannot reach. Thinking the entire thing was dead and gone, you can imagine my delight to see it sprout a small plant this spring. It has conical heads of white flowers which turn woody in the fall–literally, like little chips of wood. And of course the leaves! Worth trying to save.
all the voices in my head 