Twelfth Night of Christmas Concert

A concert celebration the Twelfth Night of Christmas will be held at the First Congregational United Church of Christ at 5th and Juniper in Brainerd on Sunday, January 7th at 7pm. The concert is free. Donations will be accepted and go to support Brainerd High School music programs. This is the 18th Twelfth Night Concert at First Congregational Church.

Performers include Laura Raedeke on the church’s 1922, 14 rank, Moller pipe organ, Grace Forbord and Steve Anderson on grand piano, Soprano, Shon Boman, The Christmas Brass Trio, the Brainerd High School A-Capella Singers, Windsong, and Hans Blix and the Weapons Inspectors.

Refreshments will follow in the fellowship hall.

Twelfth Night was a holiday usually celebrated the twelfth day after Christmas: January 6. This is where “The Twelve Days of Christmas” song came from. Though Twelfth Night is not celebrated anymore, it was always a huge part of Christmastide celebrations in Elizabethan England.

Twelfth Night festivities were not your grandma’s Christmas parties. They were hugely raucous and full of drinking and mischief-making. One tradition was for men to dress up as women, and women to dress up as men, and for servants and masters to switch roles for a short time.

There were even stranger traditions present in Tudor Twelfth Night celebrations. One particularly odd one involves a cake, a bean, and a pea: the vegetables were baked into the cake, and the man who found the bean became king for the night while the lady with the pea became queen. But, if you want more traditional Christmas traditions, they are part of the celebration also. Twelfth Night was a night of feasting, caroling, and wassail-drinking. It was the last night of Christmas, after all. Elizabethans wanted to send the holiday off with a bang.

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