January: a month of feasting
“During the Middle Ages the Christmas season lasted forty days, until Candlemas in 2 February, and January was supposed to be a month of feasting, not fasting - the exact opposite of the modern ‘Dry January’.”
Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year
I recently heard about a family who put their Christmas tree up so early last year that it withered before Christmas Day and had to be thrown out. By contrast, the Christmas lights are now coming down all around us, as if Christmas had finished the moment the Boxing Day sales began.
We now live in an age where Walter Benjamin’s concept of homogeneous, empty time is taken for granted; the notion of liturgical time has been largely, but not completely, forgotten. Christmas, Easter, and, increasingly, Halloween have become consumerist extravaganzas. There is a proliferation of bizarre national days (did you know that 6th January, the Feast of the Epiphany, is now National Technology Day?) Many people still fast during the forty days of Lent but don’t realise they can also feast through the fifty days of Easter.
Arguably, we feel this loss of liturgical time most acutely in January when Christmas is quickly forgotten and being down in the dumps seems almost obligatory. So here’s an idea for a New Year’s resolution: let’s remember that the Christmas season still lasts until 2 February and feast our way through Dry January.