Celebrating the third day of Christmas: The wonder of lights and ornaments

This morning, one of the participants in the Woman Alive book club Facebook group posted this comment:

“If people want to mark the 12 days of Christmas how do they keep the spirit alive when other people think it’s over? I’m back to work this morning and I’ve already seen one post of Facebook about getting the decorations down!”

Celebrating the full twelve days of Christmas is something I’ve become more keen about doing in recent years. I confess I don’t observe the season of Advent properly – for I put up the Christmas tree far earlier than I should (my excuse is that putting up the tree and decorations takes a long time). But I do love celebrating the twelve days, marking the full season and not “getting back to normal” as seems to be the tradition these days shortly after Christmas day.

One simple thing we do for the twelve days of Christmas in our family is eating our dinner in the dining room, table laden with candles, including the Advent wreath fully ablaze. We can see the Christmas tree in the living room as we eat, and it feels festive and fun.

Another idea is to pray along with the #FollowtheStar prayers produced by the Church of England, which you can find here.

Do you mark the twelve days of Christmas? Why or why not?