I learned something new today. We've all heard, I expect, about the "12 days of Christmas." You know, that extremely expensive period when "my true love" keeps compounding the gifts he or she gives until I have more maids a-milking and geese a-laying than I could ever possibly need. Okay, okay, that's the song, but what are the "12 days of Christmas"?
Apparently the 12 days of Christmas mark the amount of time Christians believe it took the wise men to travel to Bethlehem. Now, I didn't know that Christians believed that. I can't imagine where the notion that the wise men arrived 12 days after His birth came from. For reasons I don't quite grasp, this is presented as fairly universal among Christians, although the timing varies in different groups. First proclaimed in 567 AD by the Roman Catholic Church, it somehow became part of a lot of churches' traditions. Some assign a saint to be acknowledged on each day. Some see significance on that 12th day (Epiphany). Some assign significance to the gifts in the song as "code" for Christian values (for instance, "3 turtle doves" is code for "the Trinity"), which, of course, is utter nonsense, but still put forth as a good thing.
So, apparently, a not small number (certainly not all) of Christian sects have taken a thoroughly unbiblical (that is, not found in Scripture) tradition and made it "sacred." They expound on the value of such a practice. ("You can use the 12 days to do more personal study, pray, expand the idea of Christmas, etc.") Me? I'm in favor of expanding the awareness and significance of the Incarnation, but I don't need a "sacred tradition" that doesn't come from the Word to do so. I can't quite say whether I find such a practice good or bad, but I see real danger in creating new "sacred" things where God never saw fit to do so. I think ... and this is just me ... I'll just skip that part.
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Postscript. Did you know that the original words for those 4 birds were not "calling birds"? The original words were "four colley birds," where "colley" referred to "black", a reference to blackbirds. And they think the "five gold rings" referred to the band on a pheasant's neck. Thus, the first seven gifts were birds. Hmmm, fun stuff I never knew.
4 comments:
That's a new one to me. I always it took as much as a year for them to arrive. Why else would Herod order the death of all 2 year or younger males instead of a couple months old?
Another “Christmas myth” busted. (As you probably can guess, I looked at all the “Christmas traditions” long ago and found them to be mostly tenuous. That’s why I can heartily concur with your final three statements today, above your Postscript.)
Yeah, I'd always heard that it took them between one and two years to arrive as well.
I am sure you could in fact do “The 12 Days of Christmas: The Myth Busters Edition.”
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