12th Night, of course, makes me think of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Twelve days of Christmas seems an anachronistic, impossible indulgence, an almost obscene absurdity in our world. But it’s worth thinking about. Why is it so absurd? Is it the economic impact that we fear when we contemplate a twelve-day holiday? While it is certainly true that our standard of living–no small thing–is much higher than that of our ancestors, it bears thinking about how much more we work, and what we have exchanged for our material comfort. No doubt the argument could easily be made that productivity would plummet if we all took twelve days off. But there are corners of our world where this still occurs; schools and colleges still more or less follow a model of a long break around Christmas, even if we mostly call it Winter Break. Somehow learning carries on. Certainly productivity would go down, but if everyone’s productivity declined, would it truly matter that much? In Sapiens, Yuval Harari argues interestingly how in the agricultural revolution the real winner was the plants that convinced humans to cultivate them, and perhaps humans as a species. But individual humans were, by and large, worse off, if you compare their daily life with their hunter-gatherer forebears. This has an eerie resemblance to the comparison between us, with our puritanical, capitalistic ways and our medieval forebears, who had festivals throughout the year, and were less productive. Did they have something that we have lost?
But setting aside economic considerations, perhaps there is another reason we moderns can’t imagine a twelve-day holiday. Festivals–as holidays used to be called–no doubt served many purposes. But one of them was to introduce transcendence into our lives. To introduce a time outside of our normal existence, a timeless time, as it were. A time when we push ourselves to reflect on who we are, what we value, on family and friends important to us, on the year behind and the year ahead. We still do this a little. New Year’s Eve and Day is a version of this, compacted into twenty-four hours, a time when we bisect the present with a sense of the past and the future. But it, like so many things, has been commercialized and commoditized and is a media event. There is little room for transcendence when you have to watch the ball drop and have even the passage of the year interpreted for you.
But just imagine if we spent twelve days every year preparing, celebrating, sharing, reflecting on who we are and what we have and how we mean to live. Just imagine if every year ended and the next began with a cessation of our busyness for twelve days. If individually and collectively we paused. I believe if we did, keeping Christmas all the year would be much less of a challenge, for there would be a much stronger still point around which the dance of the year revolved. Those twelve days would echo subtly through the year, for, having a greater sense of ourselves, we would carry their spirit all the year long.
-Alfred Reeves Wissen, January 5, 2021