Merry Christmas! At least for the next 24 hours. As Catholics, we celebrate Christmas a little bit differently—with an entire season after the feast. You may recall we treat Easter the same way. It begins with the Feast itself, then extends into an octave of eight days in which many of the liturgical elements of the Feast are repeated, and then even goes on for a number of days or weeks afterward. The idea here is that we cannot contain our joy to a single celebration. So, we continue the feast for a good long time!

The liturgical season of Christmas is a bit of a whirlwind of different celebrations. Christmas Day is always followed up by three big feast days—the feast of St. Stephen, the first martyr, the feast of St. John, the Gospel writer, and the feast of the Holy Innocents, those children killed by Herod when he wanted to prevent the rise of the newborn King of Israel. Then last Sunday we celebrated the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. January 1st marks the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, her most exalted and important title (usually this is a holy day of obligation, but this year the obligation was lifted since it falls on a Monday.)

Then today we celebrate the Epiphany, the visitation of the Magi to the Christchild in Bethlehem. It’s called “the Epiphany” because it marks the moment that the world came to recognize the coming of the Messiah. The foreign kings are standing in for everyone as Jesus makes His first official “public” appearance before them. Certainly a day of great joy!

And then tomorrow, Christmas time will officially end at the end of the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which is celebrated this Monday. (Christ the Good Shepherd Parish in Campbell has a beautiful, grand mosaic depicting the scene of His baptism in the sanctuary of the church.) In a sense, this whole season of Christmas is a liturgical slideshow of Jesus’s early life. It catches us up to the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry, when He first arrives on the scene before John the Baptist. From there, we launch into Ordinary Time, where we hear about His life, and we learn from His teachings. The liturgical calendar is a wonderful way that we as a Church are invited to participate in the sacred life of Jesus, walking with Him and experiencing the mystery of that life in the sacred liturgy. Quite a gift. And sometimes, a rollercoaster!