Celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas: A Guide for Churches and Families. This item is unavailable.Celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas: A Guide for Churches and Families

The song “The 12 Days of Christmas” is a mainstay of the holiday season, but the practice of celebrating Christmas as a twelve-day festival fell out of fashion long ago in most cultures. In Celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas, author Chris Marchand explores the history behind the season and individual feast days from December 25 to January 6, and then offers suggestions for how you can celebrate it with your family, church, or community. Along with this, he provides answers to many of the nagging questions surrounding the holiday, such as the history behind the twelve-days song, why December 25 was chosen as the date, and what to do about its supposedly pagan origins. The challenge before us is to first help people see Christmas as a holiday that begins, rather than ends, on December 25, and then to together figure out how to reinvent Christmas in the present by learning how it was celebrated in the past.

Chris Marchand is a pastor and music leader at Epiphany Church in Peoria, Illinois. For eight years he was the headmaster of Aletheia Classical Christian School. He writes and produces the blog and podcast PostConsumer Reports. He is married to Elisa, has four children, and is always up for discussing music, films, books, and theology.