THE FEAST OF THE KINGS
TWELFTH NIGHT, OR WHAT YOU EAT
Galette des Rois, with crown.
France is a big country by European standards - the same population as Britain but five times the land area - so any chance to get out of the city and explore is enthusiastically grasped. Too enthusiastically, some say. There are ten public holidays – (* listed below, if you’re interested) – which is about the same as the United States and Britain. But if you add eight weeks’ school holidays, a few other week-long breaks scattered through the year, plus the habit of a “bridge” - i.e, taking off the intervening day when a public holiday occurs near a weekend – and it can seem that the country spends half the year closed for business.
This may explain why the move to declare a holiday on January 6th – Epiphany, aka Twelfth Night or the Feast of the Kings – has never caught on. Tant pis. People take it anyway, so that it’s only from next week that smaller shops will re-open after the Christmas/New Year break and the last office workers straggle back; those, that is, who aren’t working from home, living the national ideal: a life in the country, not just in August but all year round.
Like the feasts of the Ascension, Assumption and Pentecost, the Fête des Rois is a survival from pre-Revolutionary France, before Napoléon severed church and state. Supposedly it marks the day three kings arrived at Bethlehem from the east with gifts of gold, Frankincense and myrrh for the infant Jesus. It’s marked by rituals that remind the French they once had royalty and a church; institutions they were glad to be rid of at the time, but for which many still entertain a furtive nostalgia.
The feast is celebrated by eating a galette des rois or king's cake, traditionally at a family gathering. A disc of puff pastry filled with frangipane, a paste of almond flour, vanilla and eggs, each galette is sold with a golden paper crown, and, like its cousins the British Christmas pudding, the Hogmanay Black Bun of Scotland and the Greek Vasilopita, contains a prize; a silver coin in the British, Scots and Greek creations, but in the galette a china figurine known as a féve or lima bean. The person who finds the féve in his or her slice drops it into the glass of a child or lover, the crown is placed on that person's head, and to the toast "Le roi boit" or "La Reine boit"/The king or queen drinks, everyone toasts the person's health.
Among the most poignant uses of the ceremony by an artist was that made by Jacques Démy in his 1964 film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Catherine Deneuve, pregnant and about to contract a loveless marriage, weeps as the cardboard crown is placed on her head, a symbol of the meaningless relationship to which she is being condemned. All right, the crown is just cardboard, the galette an assault on your digestion and the féve a menace to your dental work but, perhaps because I’m a pastrycook’s son, I’ve been known to be moved as the féve clinks into my glass or that of a loved one. Le roi boit, quand même!
*New Year’s Day (January 1st) , Easter Monday (date moveable), May Day (May 1st), VE Day (Victory in Europe, ie, end of World War II (May 8th) the Ascension (May 26th), Bastille Day (July 14th), the Assumption (August 15th), All Saints Day (November 1st), Armistice Day ie, End of World War I) (November 11th) Christmas Day (December 25th.) Plus, unofficially, Whitsun or Trinity Sunday, sometime in June.
When I lived in the south "en Provence" for a couple of years I was introduced to this. It was great fun and I was crowned:)) Lucky girl that I was/am. Yes those public holidays are a bane when one is attending school and losing a day of study.