I love Twelfth Night, the holiday not the play, although I like the play too.

I mean the eve of Epiphany, Jan 5th.

Christmas is over for another eight months.

The earliest mythbustersmith sighting of a ‘Christmas’ advert in 2013 was August 24^th, so it’s been a long haul into debt, the end of which must be celebrated for the same reason it always was.  Misrule has been righted.

By that I mean the Christmas ad campaign, which thankfully ceased on Dec 24th, could be considered the modern day equivalent to the Lord of Misrule “generally a peasant or sub-deacon appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelries“. 

Who would want misrule forever? Who would want to see Christmas ads forever? Who could afford the advertising budget? Who pays and when? 

Nadia Tolokonnikowa of Pussy Riot describes the spirit of misrule perfectly: “As a child I wanted to go into advertising. I had a love affair with the advertising industry. And this is why I am in a position to judge its merits. The anti-hierarchical structures and rhizomes of late capitalism are its successful ad campaign. Modern capitalism has to manifest itself as flexible and even eccentric. Everything is geared towards gripping the emotion of the consumer. Modern capitalism seeks to assure us that it operates according to the principles of free creativity, endless development and diversity. It glosses over its other side in order to hide the reality that millions of people are enslaved by an all-powerful and fantastically stable norm of production. We want to reveal this lie.”

The great thing about Twelfth Night is that it celebrates the end of the lie, it’s absolutely hype free, and with misrule righted and Christmas pressures relieved, we can wassail away on the biggest feast of the year as depicted brilliantly on the BBC’s Tudor Monastery Farm.

It’s all so terribly unfashionable and forgotten about it must be good.

Happy days.