Although a question of personal taste, if you’re debating on when to put up and take down your Christmas decorations this festive season, it can be helpful to know the background of our traditions.
The start of the festive season
For many, Christmas begins at the end of November, with the start of advent, the Christian festival marked with the lighting of advent candles on the four Sundays running up to Christmas Day. In the US, the fourth Thursday in November is Thanksgiving, so their decorations tend to go up a little earlier than ours here in the UK. More generally, decorations in towns and cities across Europe appear as early as October, driven largely by commercial interests and the huge popularity of Christmas markets.
When it’s all over
There is far more debate about when to take down your decorations. The end of Epiphany, which falls on January 6th, has long been known as Twelfth Night, and it marks the date when the Church of England officially ends its Christmas celebrations. In fact, if you count 12 days from Christmas Day, you get to January 5th, so the consensus tends to be that one of these two dates is the last point at which your decorations should still be up.
Given that most businesses and schools return to work earlier than this, however, many people see the first working day in January as their deadline.
Last Christmas saw more people putting up their decorations earlier than usual in the wake of lockdown restrictions, undoubtedly as an antidote to such a challenging few months, and people may continue this trend this year.
