When I lived in Sweden I learned a tradition about the end of the Christmas season. Translated it goes something like this-
Twentieth day Knut, Christmas is out.
There are different variations on the saying, but they are all short and rhyme. Since I love calendars and the strange effects they can have on genealogy, I also love calendric sayings like this, but what does it mean?
In Sweden every day has one or more names associated with it, and children typically celebrate their names’ days similarly to how they celebrate their birthdays. The day of the name Knut is January 13, not the twentieth. The reason for the difference is that though that day is thirteen days into the year, is that counting from Christmas as day one, Knut is day twenty. It is the twentieth day of Christmas, and is sometimes called just that. This never made particular sense to me having grown up singing the Twelve Days of Christmas, not, and perhaps thankfully not, the Twenty Days of Christmas. At the time I figured that the rhyme involving the name Knut was the origin of the tradition. I’ve learned that it is more complicated and involves the kind of calendar complexities that I love.
The Danish prince Knut Lavard was murdered by his cousin on January 7, 1131. When he was later canonized, his saint’s day was placed on his death date. Throughout the Christian world, the Twelve Days of Christmas were held to extend either from Christmas to the day before Epiphany (January 6) or from the day after Christmas to Epiphany. In much of the English speaking world it is held to be unlucky to leave Christmas decorations out passed Twelfth Night, the night before Epiphany. In Sweden the tradition was that Christmastide ended on Knut’s day, January 7.
So why is Knut’s day now January 13? No one really knows. Sometime in the late 1600s or early 1700s, someone in Sweden seems to have decided that Christmastide needed another week. An extra week of festivities in a place where the sun barely clears the horizon at noon in January, probably seemed like a good idea. A bit more seriously, it may have been because of the loss of many holy days with the Protestant Reformation, Christmastide was extended from the traditional 12 or 13 days to 20 days to compensate, but only in Sweden. Nowhere else. Because people already associated Knut with the end of Christmas, the thought seems to have been that Knut’s Day needed to be moved so that people could continue the tradition of ending their Christmas celebrations on his day. this also happened only in Sweden. Strangely, Swedish Lutheran opinion on when a Danish Catholic saint should be celebrated did not exactly send shock waves through the Vatican.
So something that happened in Sweden on Knut’s Day in Sweden in 1650, happened on January 7. Something that happened on Knut’s Day in Sweden in 1750, happened on January 13. No one really knows exactly when the transition took place but roughly 1695. Just to add to the fun, something that happened in Denmark or Norway on Knut’s Day probably happened on January 19. Why? Because Knut’s uncle, also named Knut, was also canonized, and his day as also placed in January.
So, when you find a record that says something about an ancestor in Scandinavia, and it tells you that something happened on Knut’s Day and with Knut’s Days making up 10% of January, you’ll need to think a bit to pick the right date.
Postscript from the Department of Useless Mathematics
Given the way the verses of the song Twelve Days of Christmas get longer and longer with each day, I was curious how long Twenty Days of Christmas might be. With each verse being as long as the verse before it plus the time needed to sing about another group of things, a quick calculation shows it would take about three times longer to sing the Twenty Days of Christmas than it would to sing the original. That’s a lot of Lords a Leaping. If a standard singing of the Twelve Days of Christmas lasts for about 5 minutes, the prolonged Swedish version would go on for a rather grueling quarter of an hour. I’m also somewhat concerned about what the extra verses would contain. Perhaps they might include “…seventeen gingersnaps baking, sixteen meatballs rolling, fifteen lutfisk soaking…”