The Eve of Epiphany - Twelfth Night is tonight

Posted at "Writer's Almanac" (American Public Media, Garrison Keillor):
Today (January 5th) is the Twelfth Night, otherwise known as the eve of Epiphany. It’s the official end of the holiday season, which begins with All Hallows’ Eve, and it’s the day on which many people take down their Christmas decorations or risk bad luck for the coming year. Poet Robert Herrick wrote, “Down with the rosemary, and so / Down with the bays and mistletoe; / Down with the holly, ivy, all, / Wherewith ye dress’d the Christmas Hall.”
 It’s a last Yuletide hurrah before everyone returns to the mundane workaday world of the rest of the year. Though the origin of the celebration dates back to the Roman Saturnalia, most of the traditional observances of the holiday that have survived date back to medieval England.

English settlers in the Colonies brought the Twelfth Night tradition with them. In colonial Virginia, it was customary to hold a large and elegant ball. Revelers chose a king and queen using a traditional English method: a bean and a pea were baked inside a plum cake. The man who found the bean was crowned the Twelfth Night King, and likewise the woman who found the pea. It was the king’s duty to host the next year’s Twelfth Night ball, and the queen was given the honor of baking the next year’s cake. George and Martha Washington didn’t usually do much for Christmas except attend church, but they often hosted elaborate Twelfth Night celebrations. It was also their anniversary; they’d been married on January 5, 1759. Martha Washington left behind her recipe for an enormous Twelfth Night cake among her papers at Mount Vernon. The recipe called for 40 eggs, four pounds of sugar, and five pounds of dried fruit.

It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that Christmas became the primary holiday of the season in America, and at that point, Twelfth Night celebrations all but disappeared in this country. Many still celebrate it in the United Kingdom, with wassailing, Twelfth Night cakes, and the arrival of the Holly Man.