I usually post on the first of the month, but this month I held off for the Feast of the Epiphany. I had no idea what "epiphany" meant growing up, and learned it as a literary term having to do with James Joyce before I ever knew what a liturgical calendar was (we were "low" Protestants) and before I lived in New Orleans and found out about Kings' Day (on January 6th, the celebration of the arrival of the three kings to visit the baby Jesus). This revelation was the Epiphany. In later years I discovered from the Oxford English Dictionary that my own last name, "Tiffany," originated in slang for "Epiphany," which in England was sometimes called "the Tiffany" (God knows why). And before that, I had learned what was meant by Twelfth Night.
In Shakespeare's England, Twelfth Night was the last night of the Christmas holiday, and (despite Puritan reformers' dismay) was still celebrated in many of the lordlier households and by many of the rowdier London youth in a Mardi Gras like atmosphere of mayhem and misrule. Twelfth Night is the fifth of January, or the eve of the Epiphany. In Shakespeare terms, Twelfth Night is of course the title of one of his most famous plays, although, true to Shakespeare's occasional habit of
