Today is the final day of Christmas, the 12 days end tonight at midnight and the season of Epiphany begins with the celebration of the feast of Epiphany on January 6th. In places across the world, people celebrate the 12th day by having “12th night” parties that signal the end of the Christmas season, and sometimes, the beginning of carnival season until Ash Wednesday.
These 12th night parties were often parties that signaled change in people’s homes. People would gather together to take down Christmas decorations and sing Christmas carols a final time because they believed that it was bad luck to keep them past midnight on the 12th night. While we may not be quite as precise as getting things down by January 5th at midnight, we might see the boxes and bins that take away Christmas decorations in our homes this week.
The shift from Christmas to Epiphany is one that is meant to change our thinking from celebration to repercussion. Like Easter, Christmas is meant to be a season of celebration – recognizing and praising God for a victory. These victory celebrations are followed up with the repercussion of those victories, including the cleaning and changes that might need to happen.
You may not get everything in boxes tonight, and you might even break that rule about singing a Christmas carol or two past the 6th of January – but there is something that calls for your attention: Now that you have celebrated the victory of Christ’s birth, what is the repercussion of that in your life? How has Jesus’ coming changed us? What are you able to do or say because He has come to be with us? If Christmas is a celebration of Jesus’ presence appearing to be with us, how do we continue to recognize His presence in our lives?