Will you find the bean and be King for the day?
Christmas for the French tended to be a solemn occasion. The focus was on baby Jesus and going to Midnight Mass. Christmas Day was meant for devotion and the season of Advent was observed as a period of prayer and fasting. The word advent means coming and referred to the coming of Jesus on Christmas Day.
It was the New Year throughout France and New France that marked the beginning of a period of celebration from 1 January until Ash Wednesday.
The Feast of Kings, celebrated on January 6th (also called Three Kings’ Day or Epiphany) commemorates the day the wise men came to visit Jesus and celebrates the revelation of God incarnate as Jesus Christ himself. The King’s Cake was used to commemorate the arrival of the Three Kings in Bethlehem. The tradition is that a person who finds the bean in the cake becomes king or queen for the day and wears a paper crown.
There was no single Twelfth Night cake recipe. Some were made as a large rough puff pastry filled with almond cream.
A baptismal record noting Epiphany at Michilimackinac: “May 30 [1762], I solemnly baptized in the church of this mission two children; one the legitimate son of pierre kiniouichattouin and of marie, his wife, born at la grande Riviere about two months ago; the other the son of elizabeth nattamanisset, daughter of the said kiniouichattouin, and of one Bissonet, a voyageur, born at la grande Rivière on the 6th of January last, the feast of the Epiphany. “
Mrs. Simcoe gives us a close description of what it might have been like to go to mass on Epiphany in Canada. “January 1792, 6th Le Jour des Rois. I went with Madame Babý to the Cathedral and heard Mons. Du Plessis the Bishop’s Chaplain preach a most excellent Sermon on the subject of the Kings of the East seeking Jesus Christ. His action was animated and the sermon impressive. The Bishop himself was present, he wore a white muslin dress and a rich mantle embroidered with gold, blue silk gloves worked with gold; his mitres were pink and silver and blue and gold, he changed them two or three times during the Service, which had a theatric, poor and unfit appearance.”