You may have heard the ghastly expression Twixtmas to signify the days between Christmas

and New Year. Whilst a partridge in a pear tree and those five gold rings might be the

first thing that comes to mind when I mention the 12 days of Christmas. But traditionally

speaking it's precisely the phrase we need. For Christmas Day is really day zero of Christmas

and after it historically we have celebrated 12 days more, ending only on epiphany, the 6th

of January, also known as twelfth night. And in Tudor England it was at the midpoint of

the Christmas Tide celebrations New Year and not on Christmas Day, the gifts were given.

To think about how Christmas and New Year were celebrated in Tudor and Stuart England, I met

Dr Felicity Hill. Dr Hill is Emeritus Fellow and a former fellow in Tudor in modern history at

Jesus College Oxford. She's also a fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Historical

Society. And she's the author of Hospitality in Early Modern England and the Power of Gifts

Exchange in Early Modern England. Fittingly she invited me to join her to chat over a cup

of tea and a biscuit at her home in Oxford.

It is a great pleasure to be able to sit and talk with you in the comfort of your own house

about this wonderful aspect of early modern life. And we're thinking about, I suppose,

the ritual year, but particularly about the 12 days of Christmas and about New Year.

Did the Tudor's mark the 12 days of Christmas?

Yes, very emphatically. They did mark the 12 days of Christmas. I can think of aspects of

the full ritual year which begin to die away during the 16th century, but the 12 days of Christmas

certainly not amongst them. And it is really the apogee of the social year, I suppose one

of the things I was saying in a more modern context and each of the aspects of the 12 days

can be identified and found in a quite a wide range of sources of the period.

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