Uncle George’s Epiphany Party
The Three Wise Guys
Nova Scotians drink more rum per capita than any other people in the world.
They also celebrate Christmas longer and more enthusiastically than anyone else.
These two phenomenon may be related.
In Nova Scotia Christmas was a really big deal. We celebrated Christmas for two weeks – from the solstice to the feast of Old Christmas on the sixth of January.
Businesses and schools closed. Relatives visited and drank toddies and eggnog and drank bad sherry. We even had Boxing Day on the day after Christmas as the Canadian national day for eating leftovers.
The Catholic Church celebrates the arrival of the Three Kings with the feast of the Epiphany on the sixth of January. The selection of the sixth of January was totally arbitrary. The Catholic Church had no idea when the kings arrived, where the kings came from or even if they were kings at all.
Uncle George did not have a great affection for the Catholic Church.
The church rubbed George the wrong way from up close.
You could not chuck a Saint Christopher medal in my grandmother’s house with out hitting a crucifix or a potteried Saint Someone.
George had three aunts that were nuns.
He called them the “Three Sorrowful Mysteries.”
He had two uncles who were monsignors.
George called them the “mini- bishops.”
My grandmother lamented that they would have been bishops “but for the drink.”
The Three Wise Men were George’s favorite religious figures.
He called them the Three Wise Guys.
George loved that they wandered out of the desert late for the birthday with inappropriate gifts.
He thought they should be made the patron saints of being late for dinner.
George celebrated a “wise guys” party every year around the 12th of January.
The church and January sixth be damned, George needed an extra week to get his party ready.
He and his buddies gathered up all the neighbor’s discarded Christmas trees and piled them up on the ice in the middle of the cove.
Party time they set them afire with kerosene and then danced around the fire and toasted the three wise guys abundantly with hot Christmas punch until the police came.
George believed no party was truly successful unless the police came.
The constables had some punch, too, before shooing everyone home.
The Christmas punch was a concoction of all the neighbors leftover Christmas booze – wine from dinner, sherry and port, all braced with 151 rum.
George claimed the high-octane rum empowered the punch and lent a sense of euphoria and mysticism to the religious experience.
On the Sunday after the feast, the parish priest would blast George from the pulpit for his pagan ways.
That was George’s favorite part.