The Twelve Days of Christmas…

…start tomorrow, Christmas Day. Twelfth Night,which is one of my favourite of Shakespeare’s plays (especially the 1996 film version with Imogen Stubbs, Helena Bonham Carter and Ben Kingsley), was written for a Twelfth Night party, the celebration to mark the end of the twelve days of jollification that in Ye Olde England(e) was the true period of Christmas.

Incidentally, I was just listening to Dickens’Christmas Carol, and he mentions the Twelfth Night party, too, when the Ghost of Christmas...