Twelfth Night is the twelfth day of Christmas, aka January 5. It is the day before Epiphany. A fantastic way to bring Shakespeare into your Christmas celebrations is to have a Twelfth Night party.
When our children were younger, our family had a tradition of making an absolutely ridiculous Twelfth Night cake. We would make a simple cake from a box, but then give the kids free rein to decorate it as they wanted. When it was a 5 and 6 year old decorating, that could get pretty creative. I would provide them with icing, sprinkles, gum drops and whatever else I could find. Here is an example of what the result might be.
We treat a Twelfth Night cake differently from an Epiphany cake. Epiphany (January 6) begins the season for king cake (those pretty little cakes with a plastic baby Jesus baked inside). We enjoy a good king cake as well, but that’s not what Twelfth Night is about. Twelfth Night (the eve of Epiphany–a holy day) is similar to Halloween (the eve of All Saints Day–also a holy day) in that it has a trick-playing, topsy-turvy aspect to it. Hence the reason Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night involves characters in disguise and a trick being played upon Malvolio. So, a Twelfth Night cake should be a little fun and have some disorder to it. Ours certainly embraced disorder.
Alternatively, this is a great time of year to embrace any of the historical Epiphany traditions. The documentary The Twelve Days of Tudor Christmas identifies many of those traditions. The documentary is often more available on streaming services during the holidays, but here is the trailer.
If you live in the U.S., colonial houses and museums is another fantastic resource for learning about these traditions. American colonist brought over the Tudor and Jacobean traditions with them from England (though the Puritan colonists were rather anti-Christmas). Here is a wonderful article about the Colonial Twelve Days of Christmas by Michael Olmert for Colonial Williamsburg. For our Shakespeare Club Twelfth Night party, we recreated these marzipan hedgehogs from a Colonial Williamsburg recipe.
Leave a Reply