Today is the end of the holiday season, the twelfth day of Christmas, the Sunday before the return to school. It’s also Epiphany, or the feast day that celebrates the Three Magi’s arrival at the Nativity Scene. Here in France it’s celebrated by buying a “galette des rois” or “kings’ cake.” These flat, flaky pastries, made with croisssant-type dough and filled with a thin layer of almond paste, are prominently displayed in every bakery and supermarket I’ve seen in Paris. Inside each is a “fevre,” or favor, and a paper crown is included with the purchase.
According to my daughter’s French children’s daily newspaper, Mon Quotidien, the tradition is for a child to hide under the table, cut the cake, and distribute the pieces. The person whose slice contains the favor is crowned king or queen for the day. He or she dons the paper crown and makes a wish. We followed these instructions yesterday (a bit early) and my husband James was the lucky winner, finding a tiny pink plastic croissant on his fork.
He couldn’t decide what to wish. Back when this custom started, the decision might have been much easier.
Mon Quotidien explains that the king’s cake can be traced to ancient Rome. Noble families celebrated with their entire households, and slaves who received the special piece of cake (implanted with a dried bean, not a plastic croissant) could ask for their freedom. This was not a game to them. We’re lucky that it is for us.
That’s my epiphany. During this month, we Americans also celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, when, on January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln ordered the freedom of all slaves in Confederate States that did not return to the Union. So when James donned his crown, I thought not only of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, but of our native Wise Man, too.
Wow — as sick as slavery is in general, it seems even sicker to turn manumission into a little game like that.
Nice post. A very interesting tie between these two events, which appear on the surface to have nothing to do with one another.
A good galette is truly wonderful, you have to find a bakery that really does it well (supermarket ones are subpar). You may have to try all the bakeries in your neighborhood to find the best, but sometimes you just have to make sacrifices like that.
Minor typo in your description: the favor is called a fève, not a fèvre. It means “bean,” like a fava bean. The youngest child present goes under the table while the adults cut the galette, and is then asked, “Who is this piece for?” The child, unable to inspect the pieces to try to spy the fève, decides the order in which everyone is served. And in fact, the person who gets the fève, rather than *being* the king or queen for the day, gets the crown–and then chooses his or her monarch and places the crown on the lucky one’s head. Typically if a man gets the fève he will crown a lady, and a woman will crown a man. But nowadays anything goes, of course.
I like it when celebrations have such ancient antecedents, they are even more meaningful. Links to our pagan past, ‘baptized” so to speak by the early Christians, and now celebrated by our secular societies. I think we are the only people in the neighborhood still turning on our Xmas lights, tonight for the last time. And here we go into 2013!