The Twelfth Night, or forgotten holidays

Checking in with The Writer's Almanac today for the first time in a long time.

Today, Jan. 5, is the end of the Christmas season, or the Twelfth Night. As per usual, there's tons of compelling information at 'the Almanac:

"Today is Twelfth Night. It’s the eve of Epiphany, the official end of the Christmas holiday season, and the day on which many people take down their Christmas decorations or risk bad luck for the coming year."

- snip -

"It’s a Twelfth Night tradition to choose a king and queen for the festivities. Usually, this involves beans and baked goods. In English celebrations, a plum cake is baked with a bean and a pea inside. If a man finds the bean, he is crowned the Twelfth Night King, also known as the Lord of Misrule. The woman who finds the pea is crowned Queen. But if a woman finds the bean instead of the pea, she chooses her own king.

Part of the Twelfth Night tradition involves pranks, role reversals, and general chaos. Servants dressed as masters, men dressed as women, and people roamed the streets in gangs, decked out in costumes and blackened faces. Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night features many of the traditional elements of the holiday."

Sounds like cause for celebration. And Halloween the stuff is long put away. Speaking of ...

Container of silica gel. The size of a matchbook and pretty good for keeping stuff dry. Good for gym bags, too.

Container of silica gel. The size of a matchbook and pretty good for keeping stuff dry. Good for gym bags, too.

Our decorations are still up, and probably will be for a couple more days. Not necessarily lit up, but they're up for now. Fortunately the packets of silica gel arrived yesterday for putting up the garland, ornaments and nutcrackers in our 1,200 square foot apartment. The aim there is to store things in a closed underground garage that occasionally gets moisture. The silica gel should keep things dry and mold free inside the plastic bins I got on sale at Target. Nobody wants no musty Christmas decorations.

In doing so, I figured out that one can order stuff from Target online and pick it up at the store within 24 hours. No longer will I be stuck in lines, no longer a slave to the shopping cart! Freeeeeeeeedom!

Listening to: "The Trip" - Dave Rawlings Machine