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Expression: Tis the season to be jolly
Tis the season to be jolly, eat, drink and be merry.
Yes, Christmas is still two days away, but why not start early?
Let’s make it an even two weeks, shall we?
You already know the twelve days of Christmas stretch from December 25th to Epiphany on January 6th.
No?
Let me quickly explain it — the baby Christ was born on Christmas Day.
Of course, there were no smartphones or newspapers back then, which means the news got out slowly.
Yes, three kings visited him, but camels move at their own steady pace.
Epiphany is the day they finally got there, and news of the birth of Christ began to spread around the world.
Everyone started to celebrate – tis the season to be jolly!
Christmas in the desert!
When I was a kid, my parents called January 6th Old Christmas Day.
We always kept the Christmas tree in the house until January 6th.
I still follow this custom today here in Japan.
Japanese who don’t know about the twelve days of Christmas think it’s weird, but they don’t understand.
It’s called the Christmas season for a reason.
OK, that was a big digression from my intended topic for today’s post.
‘Tis’ is a contraction of ‘it is’.’
If you say, ‘it is’ fast, it comes out ’tis’.
It’s also the first word of the second line in the Christmas song Deck the Halls.
You probably won’t hear it used anywhere except in this song.
It’s old-fashioned English pronunciation.
However, Christmas is all about tradition – keeping old ones and beginning new ones.
Since coming to Japan, I’ve begun many new traditions, but one I didn’t want to continue was working on Christmas Day.
Now that I’m self-employed, I can take off the whole twelve days or extend it to an even two-week holiday or extend that to eighteen days.
Anyways, this is my last post for 2018.
Thanks so much for reading.
Have a merry Christmas and a fantastic New Year, and may all of your dreams come true in 2019.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 81.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.