A happy Christmas to all our readers. You may think that this sentiment has somehow got displaced from the Christmas issue, but it is in fact appropriate to January. The 12 Days of Christmas start on Christmas Eve and carry on for 12 days – the ones immortalised with a partridge in a pear tree and the rest – culminating in the great feast of the Epiphany which our cartoon depicts in the coming of the three Magi to Bethlehem (well, nearly).
While secular society starts on the grim abstinence of Veganuary and Dry January, Christians should still be celebrating the rest of the feasts of Christmas with gusto. And the festivity doesn’t end there. As Gertrude Clark points out, the Christmas season carries on in a more modified way right through January until the feast of the Purification of the Virgin at Candlemas, on 2 February. This is what we might call Long Christmas – a gradual decrescendo in the festivities rather than an abrupt termination of them.
