New Year’s has come and gone, but that doesn’t mean that the partying has got to stop. It’s still Christmastime, so don’t you dare think about taking down the tree just yet. Don’t forget about the Twelve Days of Christmas! Contrary to popular belief, these are not the twelve days before Christmas, but rather the twelve days after. In most societies that observe Christmas, the celebration actually begins with Christmas Day on the 25th of December and ends on January 6th with the Epiphany, the day the wise men arrived bearing gifts, so you’ve still got several days to go before the Yuletide spirit peters out. Trust me, it’s okay if you still want to listen to those Christmas CDs you pulled out in mid-November.

Here are two things you can do to keep the holiday spirit alive:

Have a party to take down your Christmas tree on January 5th or 6th.

The most depressing part of the holidays for me is having to take all the ornaments off the tree and try to wrangle it out to the curb with a minimum of needle-loss. It’s the ultimate anti-climax in my books. It’s even worse when you’re doing it all by yourself. So, I’ve learned that inviting friends over for an end-of-the-holidays dinner party can provide a wonderful sense of Christmas closure, not to mention it goes a lot faster when you’ve got lots of people to help you untrim the tree. This is also a great way to make sure that you’re not one of those schmucks that still has the tree up when Easter rolls around.

On a side note, nothing says you have to actually tell your invitees that they will be helping you take down the Christmas decorations. I just invite them over for dinner, and once they’ve been liquored up a bit, I casually pull out all the ornament boxes and say: “Oh, by the way…”

What are they going to do, refuse? Usually not, especially when you tell them they don’t get any dinner until the tree comes down.

Have a Twelfth Night feast.

The twelfth night of the twelve days of Christmas counts as the official end of the winter holiday season and is also a traditional day for wassailing apple trees. In the Kentucky of yore, revelers keeping alive the yuletide customs of southern and western England would gather in orchards where they sang to the trees, poured offerings of hot cider over their roots, and left cider-soaked toast in the branches for the birds. They would also make lots of noise with shouts and gun fire to scare away evil spirits and invite good luck for the coming year.

If you don’t want your neighbors to think that you’ve got a couple of screws loose, you can forego the honoring of the apple trees and offer your guests a cup of mulled cider instead. Or, prepare a jug of the lamb’s wool wassail alluded to in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream: Take 1 quart hot ale and mix it with 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon ginger, and sugar to taste. Add 6 roasted apples that have been cored, peeled and mashed and serve in heat-proof goblets. The lamb’s wool moniker comes from the fluffy chunks of white apple that float on the surface of the wassail.

Menus for a Twelfth Night dinner can vary, but I like to do something traditionally English. Start off with cream of mushroom soup with dry sherry, then have smoked salmon from Scotland (with Champagne, of course), followed by roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and honey-glazed root vegetables as the main course. Finish it off with a nice plate of Stilton with a glass of port, and don’t forget the King Cake for dessert. A distant cousin of the New Orleans treat we associate with Mardi Gras, this Medieval sweet is more like the fruitcakes we know in this country. In early America, the person who found the bean hidden inside the pastry became the king for the evening and enjoyed an honorary position of prominence for the night.

January 6th also symbolizes the beginning of the carnival season, so there’s one more reason to celebrate and keep the spirit alive. Whatever you do, have a glass of something for me. Happy holidays from the Bluegrass Peasant!

by David Dominé, The Bluegrass Peasant