Or What You Will

Peter Hitchens is on fine form with his rallying cry to counter the secularist war against Christmas with a campaign against the pointless celebration of a mere change in the date a week later, a celebration centred around a song to which most people do not know the words and which is not in fact about the New Year at all.

It is urgently necessary that Saint George’s Day, Saint Andrew’s Day, Saint David’s Day and Saint Patrick’s Day be made public holidays throughout the United Kingdom. In place, like them, of our ridiculous celebrations of the mere fact that the banks are on holiday, the real Whit Monday should be restored, and Ascension Day made a public holiday along with it.

Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday and Boxing Day should be retained, and Commonwealth Day (not Trafalgar Day, for who wants to sit in the wind and rain marking an inconclusive battle at which our admiral died?) added to them. Giving eleven, concentrated in our islands’ glorious spring and early summer.

But eleven is an odd number in more than one sense. How to arrive at a nice, round dozen? Well, if the Epiphany were restored as a public holiday, then so could be the ancient, yet really quite recently practised, observances of Twelfth Night, secure in the knowledge that there would be no work the next day.

No, the world would not simply shut down from lunchtime on Christmas Eve until the morning of 7th January, as it very largely does from lunchtime on Christmas Eve until the morning of 2nd January at the moment; the length of time would be too long for that. This way, there would be a real gap between the holidays. As, of course, there was historically, unless anyone really imagines that even subsistence farmers ever stopped work for twelve days on the trot. And the holidays themselves would mean something.

As much as anything else, the erection of Ascension Day and the Epiphany as public holidays would force the “Catholic” Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales to reverse its petulant lashing out against the election of an orthodox Catholic as Pope, namely its transfer of those holy days to the following Sundays, so that (unless we can attend thin-on-the-ground Latin Masses) we no longer get to celebrate them on the same day as the Holy Father, even though members of the Church of England and the Church in Wales do.