Twelve Fobs of Christmas Delayed by Facts

One of the clearest childhood Christmas memories I have is of sneaking up to someone's doorstep in the dark, dropping a package--with cutout magazine letters describing the contents thereof--on the doorstep, then ringing the doorbell and running like crazy to get back to the family car without being spotted. Nowadays you get arrested by the FBI for such behavior, but in that innocent age it was mostly overlooked. At least a couple Christmases during my formative years, my family did the twelve days of Christmas for another family, either because they were in need or just because we liked them. Starting twelve days before Christmas and every day thereafter until Christmas, we would get some kind of gift to match the day, come up with a clever line or two to decorate the brown paper grocery bag, and make the delivery each night without getting caught. I enjoyed this not so much for the warm fuzzy feeling of having done something nice as for the piped-up adrenaliney feeling of being sneaky. A couple years ago, FoxyJ and I did something similar for a family that lived upstairs from us, and I enjoyed it just as much.

So this year, when Tolkien Boy challenged Foblog contributors to post Christmasy things for our fellow Fobs, and upon counting I realized that there are 12 Fobs besides me, I decided that I must go against TB's plea not to and create the Twelve Fobs of Christmas. As I got ready to do so, though, I came up against a nagging question I've had for years--does the Twelve Days of Christmas start on the 13th and go to the 24th, or does it go from the 14th to the 25th?

Rather than randomly decide on one or the other, I decided to look it up. After some in-depth research of the type that only an experienced information professional such as myself could perform, I found that the Twelve Days does not start on the 13th or the 14th. Rather, the Twelve Days of Christmas run from the night of the 25th through the night of January 5th, otherwise known as (duh) Twelfth Night. January 6th, then, is Epiphany, or as I and other people who've lived in Spain know it, Dia de los Reyes.

It troubles me to no end to know that all those years my family was doing it wrong. But alas, there's nothing I can do now but press forward in the light of the truth. So, now that I am no longer deceived (you might say I've had an epiphany), you can watch for my oh-so-clever ode to my fellow Fobs to appear nightly on the Foblog between December 25th and January 5th. And to all the rest of you who aren't official Fobs, well, I'm sure I love you too.