This one of the 12 Days of Christmas
travels around the calendar. It’s normally the Sunday after Christmas, but when Christmas itself falls on a Sunday it’s 30 December.
The intent of this feast is to celebrate the Holy Family, and to draw inspiration from them for your own family.
I like this idea of putting a little meat on the bones of the 12 Days of Christmas as an attractive instructive exercise. The fact that schoolchildren even in religious schools have had the days off as a vacation for over a century has likely contributed to not many people learning much about the days unless someone made a specific effort.
ReplyDeleteThat's definitely the case for me. I was raised Presbyterian, and the 12 days were not a big thing for us as a kid because of the stripped-down Calvinism. I came into adulthood only knowing they existed from the song about Five Golden Rings, and had no ideal if Christmas was in the middle of them, or at the end of them, or at the beginning. I remember learning first that the last day was the Feast of the Epiphany, and even then it was some years before it occurred to me to ask what the other days were about.
ReplyDeleteIt's a feast day of seemingly growing importance every year, as the attacks on traditional family structure continue unabated. One wishes the Bishops would make more of it.
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