The following is an interesting quote from Leigh Hunt 'The Seer' London 1850. It is quoted in chapter 16, 'Epiphany to Candlemas', in Clement A. Miles 'Christmas Customs and Traditions: Their History and Tradition' Dover 1976. It indicates the importance of the secular festival of the Twelfth Cake held for some in the mid-19th century:

'Christmas goes out in fine style - with Twelfth Night. It is a finish worthy of the time. Christmas Day was the morning of the season; New Year's Day the middle of it, or noon; Twelfth Night is the night, brilliant with innumerable planets of Twelfth-cakes. The whole island keeps court; nay, all Christendom. All the world are kings and queens. Everybody is somebody else, and learns at once to laugh at, and to tolerate, characters different from his own, by enacting them. Cakes, characters, forfeits, lights, theatres, merry rooms, little holiday-faces, and, last not least, the painted sugar on the cakes, so bad to eat but so fine to look at, useful because it is perfect, useless except for a sight and a moral - all conspire to throw a giddy splendour over the last night of the season, and to send it to bed in pomp and colours, like a Prince'.

Cheers, Stewie.