Twelfth Night...

The end of Christmas?  Or the beginning of Carnival!
.
An evening's wassailing not being what it once was, Twelfth Night has declined into one of the less widely celebrated of the ancient festivals. All the same, Twelfth Night is still one of the most welcome days in the calendar, in spite of the absence of agreement about when it actually falls. If you take the view, as some do, that the evening of 24 December marks the start of Christmas, then last night, 4January, was the twelfth. If you go with 25 December as the first night, as most do, then Twelfth Night instead falls this evening, 5 January. Many nevertheless continue to regard 6 January, the feast of Epiphany, as Twelfth Night. Yet if there is little concord about when Twelfth Night actually falls – and perhaps it hardly matters – there is at least a healthy consensus that it marks the decisive end of Christmas. Twelfth Night, whenever observed, is the universally understood moment when the decorations come down, the cards are removed and the tree is stripped and banished. In Trafalgar Square tonight, London's Christmas tree, which survived student protesters' attempts to torch it last month, will finally become mulch. In Tate Britain, Giorgio Sadotti's bare spruce will come down too, as the spirit of Christmas is driven out of the gallery in a free one-off piece of performance art. Twelfth Night offers one last chance for revels and misrule. Shakespeare, who understood this best, subtitled his transgressive play What You Will. Tomorrow, though, the normal order resumes – and not before time, for many of us.  - The Guardian
.
(For the very traditional, Christmastide lasts until Candlemas.  Happy Christmas!)