Well, Christmas is over. Time to pack all the garlands up, find some different music to play, put away the holiday treats. 

Or is it? 

Some of you may be more than ready to say goodbye to red and green decorations until next year (a friend of mine started taking her tree down by noon on Christmas), and most of our society considers December 24th and 25th as the sum total of the holiday. If anything, we are more accustomed to the weeks preceding Christmas Day as part of the festivities, with commercialism and sales advertising pushing people to start buying presents earlier and earlier. 

Over the last few years I myself have really emphasized the season of Advent; obviously those four weeks are inextricably tied to Christmas, yet they also are separate, waiting for and pointing to the coming celebration of Jesus’ birth but ending on Christmas Eve. 

However. You’ve heard of the Twelve Days of Christmas. You’ve almost certainly sung about them, likely stumbling over how many lords and ladies, possibly belting it out about five golden rings, potentially even calculating how many presents my true love gave in total (364!). 

But those seemingly silly lyrical gifts are theoretically linked to important biblical truths, at least by the numbers, and the twelve days themselves are the ones starting with and continuing after Christmas. Twelve is the commemorative number of days assigned to the length of the magi’s journey in search of the new king, and so January 6 marks Epiphany, also known as Three Kings’ Day or Theophany. The Feast of Epiphany was actually established and celebrated even before Christmas was deemed the day of Nativity, and it focuses on several aspects of the manifestation of Jesus’ divinity.

These intervening twelve days of Christmas, while also solemnly honoring particular saints and martyrs on certain days, are generally intended for continued feasting, festivities, and merriment. So I say let the party continue! New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are clearly within that time frame; schools are out and some people have another couple of days off work, so there are some vacation vibes anyway. 

Now, that doesn’t mean I’ll go out searching for a dozen partridges in pear trees, although that sounds rather pleasant in the proper context. We could use a little more help in the milking barn, but eight maids a-milking would be too many, not to mention the cumulative 40. It would seem very appropriate for me to do some digging and figure out some traditional foods to fix on the feast days … but I have a feeling I’ll do some research that ends up being more proactive for next year instead of getting many things made in the next couple days yet. 

But I will take this extended span of Christmas wholeheartedly still. Putting Kiah in her red-and-green checked dress for the third Sunday in a row, reminding people I can still wish them a Merry Christmas for twelve days past the 25th, letting the kids unwrap holiday books from under the tree since we didn’t get through them all before traveling to Ohio, making party food like continued feast days deserve. 

The kids got loud enough toys for Christmas, though, so please, no more drummers drumming.

Fresh Spinach Dip

No calling birds or swans a-swimming were harmed in the making of this recipe. My Weber family has long had the tradition of a couple soups and a variety of dips for our Christmas Eve meal, and for some reason spinach dip found its way into our yearly expectations. Or at least mine — Mom had kind of forgotten about it, so I made do with what she had available. It was different from the norm, but with an appealing freshness to it.

Prep tips: add dashes of garlic and onion powder if you want more savoriness.

• ½ cup thick plain yogurt or sour cream

• ¼ cup mayonnaise

• ½ tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

• ½ tablespoon lemon juice

• 1 teaspoon nutritional yeast

• dash of smoked paprika

• salt and pepper to taste

• several good handfuls of fresh spinach, chopped small

• a handful of shredded carrots

• ½ cup roughly chopped bean sprouts or water chestnuts

Combine all ingredients. Serve chilled, with tortilla chips, crackers, and raw veggies. 

Lettuce Eat Local is a weekly local foods column by Amanda Miller, who lives in rural Reno County on the family dairy farm with her husband and two small children. She seeks to help build connections through food with her community, the earth, and the God who created it all. Send feedback and recipe ideas to hyperpeanutbutter@gmail.com.