Twelfth Night, and Welcome to It

And so we come at last to the conclusion of the Xmastide festivities, this night of the Twelfth Day of Christmas 2010 of the Common Era (or 12010 of the Holocene Era). The War on Christmas didn’t get as much press this year as last, it seems like, though some nuts in California apparently are lobbying to make Christmas carols mandatory. I hope they mean for the Xmas season only, and not all year. I mean, I like “O Holy Night” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem” all right, but I’m pretty well Xmas caroled out for the foreseeable future.

This is the first year since I was a child that I didn’t expose myself to some version of “A Christmas Carol” and “The Nutcracker”; I didn’t listen to “Green Chri$tma$”; I didn’t even dig out “A Christmas Garland.” (I’ve sort of lost heart a bit, what with losing most of my library this past year.) We did have a tree—still have it up actually, though I suppose we should get busy taking it down, what with Epiphany just around the corner and all. I have a hard time caring, truth to tell.

I got one really cool gift for Xmas—April D. DeConick’s Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas, which I’m really looking forward to digging into. I’ve read through it, of course, but I’m going to have to brush up on my Coptic—and there’s another annoyance, my Coptic grammar seems to have disappeared with the bulk of my library, though (thank God) not my dictionary. Roadblocks everywhere I look. Anyway, I’m going to have to get up to speed a bit to really come to grips with the subject. Still, it should be fun.