Now! Quickly and without looking it up: when are the Twelve Days of Christmas? Come on---come on: you should know this. And you can stop all that furtive counting backwards on your fingers and ...Yeuch!... put your sock back on! Right Now!!

Of course it starts on Christmas Day (or more properly the evening before) and runs through to Epiphany. And the fact that Epiphany is also called Twelfth Night ought to be at least a bit of a clue, and we are now slap-bangish right in the middle of it.

So just to be clear Christmas is after Christmas Eve and before then (in spite of it being when most people now-a-days seem to do most of their Christmas stuff) it's actually bloody Advent !

Now, in the song 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' she (or he, or whatever) gets the bird (in, yes you've guessed it, yet another example of a poor tortured tree) on Christmas Day and all the action follows during the twelve days after this; not, as in popular perception, the twelve days before, which is a pity because a year or so back my elder daughter (Emma Ælflæd, who has always been a rather fine actress---or as they now seem to call them in homage to the pre-Restoration theatre when women's parts were played by boys, actor) was acting in a sort of Christmas review thingy at her school and sang a song called The Twelve Days After Christmas by Frederick Silver.

The Twelve Days After Christmas is a quite funny song which deals with the aftermath of a fight with the true love of the original song---the shooting of the partridge, more tree abuse (she chopped it down and burnt it just for fun) and the return (or disposal) of all the gifts; inanimate, animate and human; except for one of the drummers, for reasons that I hope went right over Emma's head at that stage of her life.

All fine and good. But I wonder if (or more accurately)---Since I strongly suspect that all this was envisioned as taking place right after Christmas Day it means, of course, that the presents were being returned at exactly the same time as they were being given! And (for most of them at least) it was days before the event that caused the return---an event that was for them still well over the event horizon!

Well, visions of Doppelgangers, interrupted entropy and the demise of the arrow of time are now dancing in my head!

Don't these fools realize what can happen when two events try to occupy the same space-time co-ordinates. I'm sure Dr Who has dealt with this at great length, as for example when he defeated the Pirate Planet before it could destroy the Earth.

And this, this, is the sort of horror our daughters are exposed to in school!

I say "Shame!" and I say it is time we started doing things at the right time and in the right order. Let's have no more of this Christmas creep.

Let's have our Twelve Days at the right time, after rather than before Christmas Day, where they belong and if we must return anything, or indeed everything, let's wait to do it after Epiphany.

And while we are at it let us put our Christmas Trees up on Christmas Eve like reasonable people, and, like decent people, let us make sure that they are artificial trees. I mean our family has been very happy with a lavatory brush tree for many a year and the assembly keeps the children occupied for most of Christmas Eve. And it fills them with wonder at the brilliant technology transference from disgusting twisted wire brush structure to noble arborioidal structure!

Anyway, finally, now that I'm back on THAT fraught subject, there is some good news for Christmas Trees -- they seem to be fighting back! My attention was recently drawn to a reference to a very old article in the Lancet of the December 8, 1984, Eye Damage from Christmas Trees, (by D. J. Brazier, vol. 2, no. 8,415 p. 1,335). I can't wait to read it. I imagine some aggrieved tree tapping its erstwhile tormentor on the shoulder, the arboricidal maniac turns round and gets a quick poke right in the eye with a candy cane. Good for the tree's morale, and who's going to believe the poor sap. "Whaaaaaa! The tree just attacked me!" Likely story---tell that and you'll get plenty of insult to add to your injury.

So you have been warned!

Cheerio for now

from Richard Howland-Bolton