Plough Monday It Isn’t, But a New Beginning It Is

January 4 is the eleventh day of Christmas, but it feels like Plough Monday – traditionally the Monday after the twelve days of Christmas when farmers in the British Isles got back behind the plough.

There are all sorts of rubrics regarding the history and significance of the twelve days of Christmas – the days from Christmas Day to the Epiphany on January 6. Whatever its significance, the celebration of Christmas across twelve days is an instance of tradition getting it right.

Even now, two thousand and sixteen years in, twelve days feels just right. It’s a span of time that takes in Christmas and New Year’s, and so allow’s New Year’s to be the beginning of the calendar year rather than the end of the holiday. It allows for some days of feasting and some days of traveling and some days of nothing in particular. Mathematically set slightly at odds with the seven-day week, it’s a reminder – as Judith Schulevitz said of the Sabbath – of “a different order of time.”

This particular span of twelve days has felt just right, too. There was Christmas Day. There followed the day my son Pietro and I went ice skating together at the newish rink in Prospect Park. The day the Jets won an overtime thriller against the Patriots. The day of an indoor soccer tournament in New Jersey. The day my brother and sister-and-law and aunt came to a second Christmas dinner. The days when I played lap steel and read Elvis Costello’s autobiography and, in the evenings, we settled in as a family and watched the original Star Wars trilogy. There was New Year’s eve – with two charades-based parties in Brooklyn – and New Year’s day around my mother-in-law’s table in the upper reaches of New York City as my mother celebrated her 75^th birthday in Florida. The day our older boys went for interviews at Regis High School on East 85^th Street, and the day we did nothing much but turn a few screws around the house and get ready for a run of very full days. And here we are at the eleventh day of Christmas, with Epiphany ahead – our youngest son’s birthday, and so a holiday always and of its own kind.

January fourth it is, as Yoda would say. Strictly speaking, it isn’t Plough Monday, but I am happy to be behind the plough again.

A little rusty I am, but I figure that that’s all right.

4 January 2016
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