The Real Twelve Days of Christmas: How Medieval England Kept Them

Christmas was a season, not a day

Today Christmas often ends on the evening of December 25. For medieval people, that was when it started. The Twelve Days ran from Christmas to Epiphany on January 6, the feast of the Magi's visit to the infant Jesus. According to the Christian History Institute, the Council of Tours in 567 named this stretch a special season of feasting, with Advent as the fast that prepared for it.

Sources count the days slightly differently. Some run them from December 25 to January 5, Twelfth Night, the evening before Epiphany; others run them through January 6 itself. Medieval and Tudor people kept the whole stretch as one long celebration, so the counting mattered less than the party.

How medieval England kept the Twelve Days

Midwinter was a quiet time on the farm, and Christmas was by far the longest holiday of the year. As Mark Cartwright explains in the World History Encyclopedia, many peasants were permitted by their lord to take the whole two weeks off. By tradition, serfs on an estate were invited to the manor for a Christmas meal, while key workers such as the shepherd and oxherd received gifts of food, drink, clothing and firewood. Serfs, in turn, often gave the lord extra bread, eggs or poultry.

Games and mock kings filled the evenings. By Tudor and Elizabethan times, the Folger Shakespeare Library notes, gifts were exchanged on New Year's Day rather than Christmas Day, and a Lord of Misrule ran the entertainments until Twelfth Night, when he stepped down. Then work resumed: Plough Monday, the Monday after Epiphany, sent farm workers back to the fields, and plowboys dragged a decorated plow through town to collect money for the parish.

The feast days inside the Twelve Days

The Twelve Days were not one long blur. They were stitched together from separate holy days, each with its own character. The Western calendar, which medieval England followed, ran roughly like this; Eastern churches arranged some of the same feasts on different days. On the Feast of Fools, Mark Cartwright notes, minor clergy might wear their clothes inside out and lead a donkey into church.

• December 25: The Nativity, Christmas Day itself.
• December 26: St. Stephen.
• December 27: St. John the Evangelist.
• December 28: The Holy Innocents, or Childermas. In medieval churches, choirboys sometimes took the places of the bishop and senior clergy for the day.
• December 29: St. Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury.
• January 1: The Circumcision of Christ, when minor clergy sometimes staged the topsy-turvy Feast of Fools.
• January 5 and 6: Twelfth Night and the Epiphany, the grand finale of the season.

Twelfth Night and the Twelfth cake

Twelfth Night was the last great party of the season, so famous that Shakespeare borrowed its name for the title of his comedy. In the Middle Ages, one favorite game was to bake a bean into a cake; whoever found it became king of the bean for the evening, a game traditionally played on Twelfth Night.

The Twelfth cake most people picture is a later invention. According to food historian Pen Vogler, writing for the Charles Dickens Museum, Twelfth cake is first recorded in England around 1570. By the time of the diarist Samuel Pepys in the 1600s, it was a rich, spiced, yeasted fruit cake with a bean for the king and a pea for the queen. By the early 1800s, printed character cards had joined the game. Later in the 19th century the custom faded: the tokens strayed into the Christmas pudding, and the cake itself shrank and moved to Christmas Day.

So a guest in 1420 might well have hunted for a bean in a cake, but not the elaborate Georgian confection that later carried the name.

The song, and the myth of the secret catechism

The cumulative song The Twelve Days of Christmas, with its partridge and pear tree, first appears in print in a children's book called Mirth without Mischief, published in London and usually dated to about 1780, although some catalog records date surviving copies closer to 1800. It was a memory-and-forfeit game: each player had to repeat the growing list of gifts, and anyone who slipped up paid a forfeit. Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie concluded that the meaning of the song has yet to be satisfactorily explained.

You may have heard that the song was secretly written to teach Catholic doctrine in Protestant England, with each gift standing for an article of faith. This is a modern myth. The idea was proposed by Canadian teacher Hugh McKellar in 1979 and spread by a 1982 article that was posted online in 1995. No historical evidence supports it. As fact-checkers at Snopes have pointed out, nearly every belief supposedly encoded in the song was shared by Catholics and Anglicans alike, so there was nothing to hide.

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