The Feast of the Epiphany

In our diocese, the Feast of the Epiphany is moved to Sunday, so we celebrated yesterday. On the Epiphany, we remember the manifestations of Jesus’ divinity: at His finding by the magi, at His baptism, and at the wedding feast at Cana. Fr. Harvey gave a good homily at Mass yesterday, where he mentioned that the magi who searched for the newborn king were pagan. They were pagan when they presented Him with gifts and paid Him homage. They were pagan when they returned home. There is no record of them converting, either to Judaism or Christianity after the event. Yet, God revealed Himself to them, guided them with a star, and spoke to them in a dream.
Something to ponder.

At home, the children made and decorated crowns and the Christmas star. After having a feast fit for royalty, we had a cake with a gold coin (a dollar!) baked in it. The children choose a piece of cake, youngest first and oldest last, and the one finding the coin in their piece gets to be the High King/Queen and lead our procession through the house carrying the Christmas star. This year, Mojo got the coin, but she gave it to her little sister and let her little brother carry the star. (No, they don’t share like that all the time…but it warms my heart when they do! And the reason she shared is because little brother cried and little sister threw a royal fit when they didn’t find the coin.)
  After dinner, we each wrote down gifts that we will present to Jesus this coming year. These include things like making more of an effort to share, praying a daily rosary, praying a weekly Chaplet of Divine Mercy, etc. We put the “gifts” into a pretty box, and also had a censer filled with frankincense and a box of gold jewelry for our “magi” to carry. We processed through the house, following the High King, singing “We Three Kings”. We stopped at each of our outside doorways, where Daddy Bear blessed the doors with holy water, and marked the doorways with chalk--“20+C+M+B+10”. The numbers are for the current year, and C+M+B stands for“Christus mansionem benedicat” which means “May Christ bless this house.” Tradition also tells us that the names of the magi were Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar. 
After blessing our doorways, we process to our Nativity scene and present our gifts before the Baby Jesus.

So concludes our celebration of Christmas for this year. Sometime this week, I’ll put away the decorations, when I get around to it. For today, we’re going to blow off work and school work so that the kids can enjoy playing in the snow. Where we live, we have snow maybe a couple days out of the year.