Candlemas

Candlemas, on 2 February, keeps the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, forty days after his birth, when, following the Law, Mary came for her purification and the child was presented to God and greeted by the aged Simeon and the prophetess Anna. Simeon's song, the Nunc Dimittis, "a light to lighten the nations", gives the feast its theme and its name: the day is marked by the blessing of candles and a procession of light, the light standing for Christ revealed to the world.

The feast is old, attested in fourth-century Jerusalem by the pilgrim Egeria, and it closes the Christmas-Epiphany cycle at its fortieth day, the point at which, in many traditions, the crib is finally put away and the "forty days of Christmas" end. In the agricultural year it became a marker of the turn toward spring, tied to weather lore (the ancestor of Groundhog Day) and, in the British Isles, overlapping the Celtic Imbolc and the feast of Brigid. In the East it is the Great Feast of the Meeting (Hypapante), the encounter of the infant Christ with Simeon, understood as the meeting of the Old and New Covenants.

English folk custom long held that any Christmas greenery, holly, ivy and other evergreen decoration, left up in the house past Candlemas would bring misfortune in the year ahead, a belief recorded in seventeenth century verse, including Robert Herrick's poem instructing that the greenery be taken down by Candlemas Eve and replaced with the fresh box or other greenery appropriate to the new season, evidence that a firm folk deadline for de-decorating after Christmas existed in England centuries before it became a matter of personal preference.

That custom reflects Candlemas's original role as the formal closing point of the Christmas and Epiphany season at its fortieth day, and although the specific belief about misfortune from lingering greenery has faded from most people's practical calendar, the broader idea that Christmas decorations should come down by early February rather than being left up indefinitely still shapes ordinary household habits in Britain and some other countries today, a faint but traceable survival of a liturgical deadline in entirely secular domestic practice.

In Mexico and other parts of Latin America, Candlemas, kept there as Dia de la Candelaria, is linked to the Twelfth Night cake eaten at Epiphany: whoever finds the small figurine of the infant Christ baked inside the rosca de reyes is traditionally obliged to host a Candlemas gathering on 2 February and provide tamales for the assembled family and friends, a chain of obligation running from one feast to the next that has no equivalent in the English candle-blessing and greenery customs described above.