The historic case for leaving your Christmas decorations up until February
Ainsley Hawthorn | FOR CBC N.L. | Posted: January 3, 2025 9:30 AM | Last Updated: January 3
Tradition is to leave decorations up well after December
If you celebrate Christmas, you may already have taken down your decorations — or perhaps you're a traditionalist who leaves them up until Jan. 6, the Feast of Epiphany and the end of the twelve days of Christmas.
But there's a historical case to be made for leaving them up another full month.
For centuries many people didn't take their decorations down until Feb. 2, the Christian festival of Candlemas.
In Newfoundland and Labrador and some other parts of the world, it's now considered bad luck to leave your Christmas decorations up past Jan. 6, but that tradition once applied to Feb. 2.
In the 1648 verse Ceremony Upon Candlemas Eve, English poet Robert Herrick warned that those who left evergreens on display past Candlemas were at risk of supernatural torment:
Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the baies and mistletoe;
Down with the holly, ivie, all
Wherewith ye drest the Christmas hall;
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch there left behind;
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected there, maids, trust to me,
So many goblins you shall see.
A full forty days after Christmas, Candlemas is one of the oldest Christian holy days. It's been observed — like Christmas and Epiphany — since at least the fourth century.
Known officially as the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary or the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus, Candlemas commemorates the day Mary and Joseph brought their son, Jesus, to be presented at the temple in Jerusalem in accordance with Jewish custom.
By the High Middle Ages, Candlemas had become, also like Christmas and Epiphany, a festival of light. Church services began with a blessing of the candles to be used in the coming year, followed by a candlelit procession.
The last of the winter feast days associated with the birth and infancy of Jesus, Candlemas came to be seen as the finale of the Christmas season.
According to Rev. Henry Bourne, an Anglican minister writing in 1725, the majority of English people at that time celebrated right up until Feb. 2.
"Till then they continue feasting, and are ambitious of keeping some of their Christmass-cheer, and then are as fond of getting quit of it."
Although the Christmas holiday formally ended for English agricultural workers on Plough Monday, the first weekday after Jan. 6, labourers had little to do until March brought the milder temperatures of spring. They could afford to spend much of January at leisure.
Christmas, after all, is only the beginning of winter. Though the days may begin to lengthen, January in the Northern Hemisphere is just as dark as December and even more bitterly cold.
Candlemas was the true turn of the season, when enough hours of daylight had returned that shoe-makers and other artisans who worked indoors could put away their candles and again work by the light of the sun.
Decorative Christmas evergreens like fir, holly and mistletoe were put up on Christmas Eve and left on display until Candlemas as a reminder of the resilience of life in the depths of winter.
The Christmas season has since moved ahead by more than a month.
Instead of decorating from Dec. 24 to Feb. 2, many northern Europeans and North Americans now decorate in November and strip the halls as early as Boxing Day.
In the medieval and early modern periods, it would have been unseemly to decorate before Christmas Eve. The weeks leading up to Christmas, which today are busy with work parties, school concerts, and family gatherings, were a time for fasting not feasting, for preparations not celebrations.
When you account for the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, our festivities take place even earlier compared to Christmas of yore.
Between the 1500s and 1700s, northern Europe and its colonies transitioned from the Julian calendar that had been in use since 46 BC to the new Gregorian calendar that more accurately matched the length of the solar year.
The Julian calendar is eleven minutes out of synch with the length of Earth's orbit around the sun. That may not sound like much, but it adds up. The calendar was shifting one day earlier every 128 years.
When European countries switched to the Gregorian calendar, they skipped ten or eleven days to compensate.
The result of all that date fudging is that Dec. 24 to Feb. 2 in the 1700s would actually be the equivalent of Jan. 4 to Feb. 13 in our calendar.
In other words, while we pour most of our Christmas cheer into the late fall run-up to the winter solstice, our forebears saved their lights, decorations, feasts and functions for the worst of the winter up to six weeks later.
And wouldn't most of us agree that that's when the days truly drag, the cold seems unrelenting, and we could really use a festival of light?
Not that everyone observed Christmas in the same way, even in the 1700s. Then, as now, some people celebrated earlier, some later, and some not at all, as recorded in this poem from The Virginia Almanack for 1765:
When New-Year's day is past and gone,
Christmas is with some people done;
But further some will it extend,
And at Twelfth Day their Christmas end;
Some people stretch it further yet,
At Candlemas they finish it;
The gentry carry it further still
And finish it just when they will;
They drink good wine and eat good cheer
And keep their Christmas all the year.
But if you're looking for an excuse to keep the holiday spirit alive, consider following the wisdom of earlier generations and delaying your decor takedown until the groundhog gives us our first sign of spring.
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