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 5^th or 6^th, with Epiphany on the 6^th.

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.

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

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Slow Christmas: And on the 10th Day of Christmas…

January 3rd, 2009

It’s hard to believe that more than a week has passed since Christmas Day. Many people plan to take down the Christmas tree this weekend.

What’s the rush?

It was a month ago that we discussed how to “Slow Christmas” to make it more meaningful.

By rights, today is the 10th day of Christmas, or Christmastide. You remember! The day when your true love is supposed to give you ten lords a leaping!

Of course, most of us are over the presents by now – particularly this year. But who wouldn’t enjoy a few more leisurely readings of the Christmas story, another lap of the train around the tree, or simply a quiet evening enjoying the beautiful decorations?

Take the time. Enjoy Christmastide. All 12 days. And when that’s over, you can have fun celebrating Epiphany on January 6th with a Three Kings Cake.

And then it’s time to finally take down the tree!

Until, then slow down, and enjoy a Slow Christmas!

— Lynn