Twelfth Night Special

TWELFTH NIGHT SPECIAL


A Twelfth Night Mossad Visit

There are so many charming “Grimm Brother”-style traditions alive and well in Bavaria today that it is a constant source of delight to observe and enjoy them.

During the Christmas holiday period for example you can take your pick.You can frighten yourself with Grampus and Nickolaus, a furry, horned monster and his mild-mannered saintly keeper, or you can enjoy the goodies brought by the “Weinachtsman”—an old peasant-type gentleman dressed in furs who mysteriously appears annually with a bag of sweets. Or you might wait for the Christ Child to visit your house with gifts.

But the traditional characters I like best are “the three wise kings from the East” who visit every house where Catholics live to make their mark over the front doorway with the chalked graffiti: K.M.B. and the year— like this: “19 K.M.B. 98”.

K.M.B. are the initials of the wise king’s traditional names: Kaspar, Melchior and Balthasar.

Every year on the Twelfth Night after Christmas, three men are selected to costume themselves in the imagined splendiferous robes of oriental magi to fulfill this function. If you are a Catholic in good standing, these masqueraders knock on your door, sing you a song and chalk up their mystic initial symbols which must remain there for good luck until the visit of the three kings on the Twelfth Night of the next year, when the new kings will erase this year’s chalk-marks and put up new figures.

Since it is usually beastly cold on January sixth, it is also traditional to invite the “kings” in for cookies and something warming to drink.

This “three kings” tradition sort of extends the mystery and fun of Christmas for at least twelve days—and closes the holidays very neatly it seems to me. I also like to see the chalked initials on the lintel over the front door whenever I enter or leave the house throughout the year. For me, it is a pleasant reminder of the generous spirit of the holidays.

In fact I like this Twelfth Night tradition so much that, even though I am not a Catholic, I sometimes gather a couple of friends to play the parts of the other kings and the three of us have gone visiting, chalking up the traditional K.M.B.’s and the year on the front doorways of other friend’s houses in parts of the world where this holiday tradition is unknown.

I was staying at a Yoga institute in Ahrensburg, in the far north of Germany one Christmas and asked my friends if they observed the Bavarian three kings Twelfth Night tradition. They said they did not, but it sounded like fun and they wouldn’t mind dressing up as three wise kings and going out with me to mark the front doorway lintel of some of their friends.

So I contacted a small group of friends and neighbors and got their permission to visit them on the Twelfth Night.

I had spoken several times with the Lutheran pastor of the village church and, seeing him on the street several weeks before Christmas, mentioned the custom and asked if he would also enjoy a visit. He agreed to accept we three kings but with his own preparations for the holiday season, probably forgot all about this commitment.

When Twelfth Night came, my friends arrived at my room at about 9 pm dressed very nicely for their roles as temporary royalty. The friend playing the part of the traditional Negro king had blackened his face with burnt cork. The other friend had a neat towel turban and a striped bed sheet robe over his parka. I threw a colorful bedspread “robe” over my winter clothes and placed a shiny tinfoil-covered cardboard crown, which I had made for myself and decorated with a six-pointed Star of David on my head. The friend playing the black king tossed some costume glitter dust over us and out we walked out into the cold dark night.

We had successfully visited all of our appointed houses, singing “We Three Kings of Orient Are” in English to the great amusement of everyone and accepting cookies and cocoa, when we arrived at our last house; the house of the Lutheran pastor.

I knocked lightly on his front door and we began to sing. The pastor opened the door and, smiling, invited us in. But when I came out of the gloom, his smile disappeared and a look of terror came onto his face. He disappeared into an adjoining room and came haltingly back with wine and glasses, which he offered us. When he served me a small glass of wine, his hand shook so badly that he almost spilled it. I really didn’t know what to think, but drank, thanked him and we left.

The next day I mentioned the minister’s strange behavior to one of the men who had been a “king” with me the night before and he laughed.

“Oh, this morning I heard that he had preached an anti-Jewish Twelfth Night sermon at his church just before we arrived—the usual old “The Wicked Jews killed our Jesus” rubbish—and when he saw the Star of David on your crown he probably thought he was getting a little visit from the MOSSAD.”

By Thomas F. Wold (Tomasito), Merced, CA, Dec. 2002


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