SO the festive season has come to a close: the celebrations are over and it’s time to put away the tinsel for another year.

However, well into the 20th century, parts of Herefordshire were still clinging to the marking of Christmas Day on Twelfth Night – actually this Saturday, January 6 – which would mean that for some the party’s only just getting started.

A century ago many country people in Herefordshire still observed ‘Old Christmas’ on this day, and they firmly believed that the Holy Thorn – growing in a number of villages across the county – would bloom on the stroke of midnight.

At the same time, cattle were said to fall to their knees in remembrance, some even shedding tears.

In more recent years, crowds have gathered at Kingsthorne, and in one instance BBC cameras were on hand to witness the remarkable sight.

The various thorn trees were said to have been descended from cuttings taken from Glastonbury’s famous thorn which was reckoned to have grown from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea.

In January 1878, Victorian clergyman and diarist, Francis Kilvert set out on a mission to find out just what was going on.

He had learned from an elderly man at Staunton-on-Wye how cattle had dropped to their knees at 12 o’clock on old Christmas Eve.

Kilvert was told: ‘...the oxen that were standing knelt down upon their knees and those that were lying rose up on their knees and there they stayed kneeling and moaning, the tears running down their faces’.

At a farm on the Welsh border the following day, he was told that 15 people had watched a holy thorn blooming at midnight.

The farmer’s daughter gave him a spray in bud, assuring him it would come out in water.

Kilvert had a cutting grafted at his own garden in Bredwardine and on January 6 the following year noted with great pleasure that the thorn had indeed blossomed despite heavy frost.

Weobley author and folklorist Ella Mary Leather included references to these miraculous events in her excellent book, Folklore of Herefordshire first published in 1912, having watched the spectacle herself at Wormesley in 1908.

A Hereford Times report in 1933 referred to a talk by Mrs Leather’s son, Clifford, who stated that the blooming of the holy thorn on Wormesley Hill on Twelfth Night was one of the most interesting details in his mother’s book.

“Even immediately previous to the war, people used to collect to watch it bloom,” he said.

In 1949, a correspondent wrote to The Times with gleeful reports that many buds on the Orcop Thorn had burst into flower within a few minutes of midnight on Old Christmas Eve.

This was said to be the time when the BBC turned up to film the phenomenon.

“They discovered at the last minute there was nowhere to plug their lamps into as electricity hadn’t yet reached Orcop!” a local recalled.

This particular thorn was claimed to be Herefordshire’s most popular, but it was sadly lost in a storm in 1980. Such is their abiding importance, parishioners at Llanwarne have replaced a tree lost from beside the church in 2009.

According to Mrs Leather, others thrived – and died – including those at Bredwardine, Eaton Bishop and Llangarron.

She listed others at Dorstone, Kingsthorne, Rowlestone, Stoke Edith, Tyberton and Wormsley.

Apparently, the draw of such spectacles could prompt landowners to remove the thorn trees.

One specimen over the Worcestershire border was chopped down by a farmer who was fed up with hordes of people turning up on Twelfth Night.

Unfortunately for him, after his violent actions he was to break both an arm and a leg, and what’s more his house went up in flames.

At Orcop, where the thorn grew beside a ruined forge close to the Maltsters Inn, nature intervened.

By the late 1940s, coachloads of spectators were turning up at Little Hill on Twelfth Night eager for a piece of the action.

But the tourist honeypot was lost when the tree blew down in a gale in January 1980.

And so the stories endure, either passed down from generation to generation, or documented by writers such as Kilvert, Mrs Leather or Roy Palmer in the Logaston Press book, The Folklore of Hereford and Worcester.

Mrs Leather pointed out that a common garden herb was also reckoned to blossom at midnight on Twelfth Eve.

In an interesting twist on the subject of equality, she explained how rosemary would only demonstrate its special powers by flourishing “where the missus is master”.