I used to find the12 days of Christmas the most tiresome of Christmas songs.  I never really knew what the 12 days were. I simply assumed they were the 12 days leading up to Christmas, with December 25 being day 12. And it seemed slightly obscene to be getting extravagant presents every day, like lords a leaping and ladies dancing and golden rings. But this year I made a very simple but very profound discovery.  And now I love, love, love the 12 days of Christmas.

What brought about this radical change of heart, you wonder?  Simply knowing the actual correct dates.  Turns out that this fact had  been hiding in plain sight all along . My German born and raised mother had always insisted that we celebrate not just the first Christmas Day (December 25, “der erste Weihnachtstag”) but the second (December 26th, “der zweite Weihnachtstag.”)  She did the same with Easter.  I thought it was just a German cultural quirk.  But after a lifetime of hearing about and celebrating the second Christmas Day, this year I idly wondered if perhaps the 12 days of Christmas actually began on Christmas Day.  I began to count forward from December 25, wondering where I would end up. The 12th day took me to January 5, which was the day before January 6. January 6 was Epiphany, commemorating the arrival of the magi. That seemed right. That fit. It seemed right that Christmas should endure until a new holy day.  ( I know, I could have just looked this all up on the internet but I figured it out all by myself!)

And it made a lot more sense than having Christmas invade the stark waiting of Advent with 12 days of riotous joy and gift giving, with the geese and dancing ladies and leaping lords invading the bleak midwinter where we languish in darkness and despair and prepare our hearts for the coming of the light.

This simple realization of the correct dates has changed so much for me. For one thing, it has totally transformed my experience of New Year’s.  New Year’s always made me really sad. One reason is that I felt like the magical and holy time of Christmas was now definitively over. The trees and crèches began to look instantly forlorn and passé to me as soon as December 25 had passed, and ever more so as the days moved closer to January 1. But no longer!  Yes, the merchants may have already placed Valentine’s Day merchandise center stage and relegated Christmas to the bargain bin and the radio stations may have precipitously dropped all Christmas music like a hot potato.   But since when is my spiritual walk dictated by the demands of the American marketplace?  It is still time to delight in the tree, in the lights, and most of all in the crèche. Christmas outlasts New Year! Eternity swallows up time!

The latter — time — is what New Year celebrates. New Year’s is always bittersweet as I reflect upon my mortality and my failings. My finitude and fallenness. How lovely to realize death has been swallowed up in life, that eternity has redeemed time. New Year’s is but a blip two thirds of the way through the 12 days of Christmas. Rather than merely celebrating the rather mundane fact that our planet has completed one more orbit around the sun, I can continue to celebrate that the creator and sustainer of all that is descended onto this selfsame small planet and became one of us. Because of that, my fallenness and my finitude have been fixed. New Year’s is regret and mortality; Christmas is the antidote. Jesus forgives my sins and transforms me, and He delivers me from death. The finitude and fallenness which New Year’s confronts me with is surrounded by and swallowed up by the miraculous grace of Christmas.

I am delighted to celebrate the 8th day of Christmas. Oh, and it is also New Year’s.  But when I feel sad for my failings or my dwindling years as signified by New Year’s, I am heartened to look at my Christmas tree and crèche and meditate upon that instead.

So, as Auntie Mame would say:

“For we need a little Christmas

right this very minute

candles in the window

carols at the spinet. . .

For I’ve grown a little leaner, grown a little colder

Grown a little sadder, grown a little older

And I need a little angel sitting on my shoulder

I need a little Christmas now.”