Shubinesque

After much thought this year, I’m beginning to see the logic of having twelve days of Christmas instead of just one. I always assumed that the twelve days referred to the days leading up to Christmas, but this is not so. They are the twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany, which is January 6th. The four weeks(-ish) prior to Christmas are the season of Advent, which looks forward to the coming of Christ.

Anyway, due to weather-related peculiarity our Christmas seemed odd this year. We were stuck in the house for all but one day for the entire two weeks prior to Christmas Day, which meant no shopping (hurray for Amazon or we’d have no presents!) or visiting friends or going to church or anything at all. Very weird.

Thankfully the snow began to melt enough on Christmas Eve for my family to make it here and happily a bit more on Christmas Day so we could get to Hubby’s family’s house on Christmas Day.

I like playing hearts with my side of the family and Dutch Blitz with my SIL’s on Hubby’s side on holidays. When my Dad’s parents lived up here we used to hang around with all Dad’s brothers and his parents and play hearts (at least that’s how I remember it), so now playing hearts says Christmasy, family things to me. However, holidays also involve a lot of things like eating good food, opening presents, and other non-cards activities. Besides that, I think I may be the only one on my side who has such a strong attachment to playing hearts.

Moving to a Twelve Days of Christmas type of schedule would take care of this because then we could spend all day in the kitchen on the holiday for those who like to do such a thing and I could get my cards fix later. Plus, no more problem of scurry, scurry, scurry, oh look it’s over already. I hate that.

I may have to do some thinking about how to do Christmas on a more leisurely schedule. Wouldn’t that be nice? I think so. I was poking around today looking for websites on twelve days of Christmas things, and found some interesting things. One of them was about the Twelve Days of Christmas song. Apparently there is some dispute about the origin and meaning of the song, but one of the ideas is that the numbers in the days are all used to help catechize children.

The numbers help remember things like this: Four Calling Birds reminds us of the Four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), Five Golden Rings reminds us of the Five Books of the Law (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), Six Geese-A-laying reminds of the Six Days of Creation, etc. Pretty neat! I’m always up for cheesy memory helps. Here’s the link in case you’re interested (scroll down to the bottom for the song): Twelve Days of Christmas. I’m going to have to put that in my Christmas box for next year so it doesn’t get lost and I can teach it to the kiddos.

Actually, they probably already have all this stuff memorized due to our excellent RCC Sunday School program. So nice! I think the sum total of what I learned in all my Sunday School years growing up in a non-Reformed church was that Jesus loved me and the song, “Father Abraham had many sons.” So sad. Now I’m going to have to go quiz the kids and see what they know.

Well, we are having what seems like it’s going to be about a gazillion people here tomorrow night for New Year’s Eve, so I’m off to go clean some more. Downstairs is about done. I love that the children like to mop and don’t complain too much about helping when we ask them to! It’s especially nice since, you know, three-fourths of the mess is from them in the first place.

Rachel