Happy Christmas: It’s Epiphany

January 6th, 2011

I interrupt this New Year to remind you that some are still celebrating Christmas! Depending on how you count the days from Christmas, the twelfth day of Christmas may be celebrated on January 5th or 6th, with Epiphany on the 6th.

This year, we celebrated Epiphany early in order to avoid having it at Children’s Hospital, where my son will have his appendix removed today. (The final stage of that awful emergency of a ruptured appendix!)

Epiphany King's Cake

It’s one more thing we do in our household to focus on friends, family and faith, as opposed to what I call “the commercial Christmas” and what my @GreenMoms friends call “holidays without the hoopla.”

My last post here was on the eve of Advent, when I blogged that I was going to try to do as my church advises: Relax. Slow Down. It’s Advent.

Of course, life doesn’t stop. I confess, I did work through the holidays,  stopping only on  Christmas Eve, Christmas, Boxing Day, and New Year’s Day. And of course I didn’t get around to everything on my agenda, but I adapted. Who says a gingerbread house needs to be made before Christmas? Voila! I decorated mine with “2011,” transforming it into a New Year’s gingerbread house!

NewYearsGingerbread

But perhaps it was the hours gleaned through “neglecting” my blog that gave me time to bake cookies, something I never got around to last year.

If you’d like to celebrate Epiphany, here’s the key part:

Boo looks at our collection of King Cake "fievres" from years past.

Boo looks at our collection of King Cake "fievres" from years past.

Get a great King’s Cake! They’re hard to bake, unless you’re a master chef, so I’m not going to suggest that. A better bet is a French bakery. In years past, we always got our King Cake at Patisserie Poupon in Georgetown, DC. This year, we tried Café Cocoa on Bethesda Lane, and were thrilled with the cake.

Cut the cake into pieces. The person who finds a small porcelein figure in their piece is crowned “King” and gets to wear the gold crown that comes with the cake. (I’ve “upcycled” our gold crowns by passing them along to a dear friend so that her daughter could play Queen Esther at the Temple’s Purim festival. Talk about Interfaith Dialog in action! :) )

Because by Christmas Eve I typically discover that we have overabundance of presents for the kids,  I set a few aside to give as “gifts” from the Wise Men.

This year, the boys each got a watch.

AdventGifts

I dodged their question about whether the Wise Men shopped at Gap or had a toy factory by asking, “What do you think?”

My eight-year-old responded, “I think   Melchior

Caspar and Balthasar got the watches because telling time is really wise, and they’re The Wise Men.”

“How did you know their names?,” I asked, wondering if something from that “boring” Sunday School was sinking in…

“From the Advent calendar!” he exclaimed.

Happy New Year! If you celebrate Epiphany this year, let me know!

— Lynn

Copyright OrganicMania 2011


7 Responses to “Happy Christmas: It’s Epiphany”

  1. sher on January 6, 2011 6:45 am

    happy and a healthy new year to you and yours, LA. thanks for the mini-lesson on the whole 12 days of christmas thing, something i have always wondered about. and hoping the dude has a speedy recovery to what sounds like a very scary experience!!

  2. Kim on January 6, 2011 8:52 am

    I love this post. Love the idea behind it. Going to do this next year. Love, love, love.

    I actually made a king cake and it wasn’t hard at all–shocked me! You can find the recipe here: http://playingwithmydinner.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/king-cake/ if you want to save yourself some money next time.

    Best of luck to the little guy, and thanks for writing this.

    Kim

  3. best of mother earth aka karen hanrahan on January 6, 2011 9:04 am

    thinking of you and yours today…
    .-= best of mother earth aka karen hanrahan´s last blog ..High Protein Diets Prevent Loss Of Muscle Mass =-.

  4. Lynn on January 6, 2011 10:44 am

    Sher, Kim and Karen,

    Thanks so much for the comments! I’m sitting here waiting (surgery delayed by an hour) and it’s so much fun to find your words on my blog!

    Sher: glad you enjoyed this! My friend hasn’t asked for the crown yet, if you do the Purim thing, let me know!

    Kim: who says you’re not a master baker??!

    Karen: egads, surgery delayed 2 -3 hours – poor guy is already starving!!!

  5. Sommer @greenmom on January 6, 2011 2:00 pm

    Happy Holidays Lynn! I’m hoping everything goes well for your son. Your family is in my prayers!

  6. Lynn on January 6, 2011 3:18 pm

    Thanks so much, Sommer! :)

    He’s out of surgery now and soon on the mend!

    Happy new year to you and yours as well!

  7. Bread.ly on January 6, 2011 6:05 pm

    Good luck to you and your son! Happy New Year!

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