Did you know that the 12 days of Christmas start on December 25th and extend to January 5th, which is known as 12th night?
These days, a lot of people confuse the advent season of preparation before Christmas with the 12 days that follow Christmas, which lends itself to the frustration and let down from all that preparation for just one day.
So what's behind the observance of 12 full days of Christmas besides two turtle doves, five golden rings, and some dancing milkmaids? The stars. Or, in fact, one particular star~and not the one that shone over the sacred birth of a child 2000 years ago, but the one that shone over your very own sacred birth.
Consider it this way: our calendar is designed so that each year we observe 12 months, which is the way we track the apparent motion of the Sun through 12 starry regions of the sky. We call these regions the "constellations of the zodiac."
When you celebrate your birthday, in essence you are celebrating the position of the Sun, the star we all share, in a certain position of the zodiac.
But during the 12 days of Christmas, it's as though we're given a space beyond the normal sequence of time to consider and experience our own relationship to our own star.
To seek one's own star is a spiritual practice, like the pilgrimage of shepherds or kings, and one way to pursue it is to consider your life experiences~particularly the year past and the year ahead~one constellation at a time. If you begin your contemplation with the first sign of the zodiac, Aries, on Christmas Day, and follow through the zodiac one constellation per day, then you'll arrive at Pisces on 12th night, January 5th, hopefully in the company of your star.
This rhythmic consideration of the whole year, undertaken once each year, is a gift only you can give yourself.
Though we know that the Earth orbits the Sun, it appears to us that the Sun moves around us against a background of changing stars, though always the same stars, which we know as the star groups, or constellations of the zodiac. Every year on our own birthday, we celebrate the Sun's return to the place in the zodiac where it was when we were born, but there's another star out there that belongs just to us, or so the ancients believed. Considering the 12 days of Christmas in relation to the 12 signs of the zodiac, one at a time from Aries to Pisces, December 25 to January 5, may bring that star knowledge to light.