A Joyous Epiphany!

Epiphany began with discovering treat-filled shoes that had been left out with grass for the magi's camels on twelfth night.  The magi always leave a book for each boy under their shoes (to help the boys become wise men) and some treats, which always include chocolate coins.  It is always a bit like a mini Christmas morning and I love ending Christmastide this way. 

And while our day began auspiciously, it ended with a lot of tired children after school and a few soar throats which made us miss the service we so hoped to attend.  We did manage to chalk the door and shared the house blessing from "The Year and our Children."  We also enjoyed take-out from the east (take-out isn't something we normally do, so it is quite the exciting occurrence to have dinner arrive at our door.)  It certainly wasn't a perfect scene as tired grumbles were all around, but we made it through the blessing and dinner together, which was good enough.

This is the second year that we have chalked the door.  You may notice that the blue chalk that we used last year was still there, so we just added pink on top this year.  I like the idea of adding layers of blessing each year.  The tradition of chalking the door is a lovey one and probably came to be because the magi visited the house where the Christ child was living.   The 20+C+M+B 16 stands for the year 2016 with the blessing of the magi in it - The magi are symbolized by  cross and their first initial (traditionally the names of the magi are Caspar, Melchior, and Belthasar).  Alternatively, the CMB can mean Christus mansionem benedicat  - May God Bless this House.

Here is the last bit of the house blessing from The Year and Our Children::

And the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.  Let us pray.  Bless, O Lord, almighty God, his home that it be the shelter of health, chastity, self-conquest, humility, goodness, mildness, obedience to the commandments, and thanksgiving to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  May blessing remain for all time upon this dwelling and them that live herein.  Through Christ our Lord. Amen. 

Twelfth Night

We've generally done most of our celebrating of the three kings on Epiphany and not on twelfth night.  But this year, for a few reasons we moved a large part of our celebration to the fifth.  I enjoyed spending this last day of Christmas setting a festive table and thinking toward an evening celebration.  I found myself sewing a gold cloth for the table.  Then I was making stars on sticks to place in the wood pieces Jim cut and I drilled for the 'trees' for our advent garden; it was delightful to find another use for them. 

Friends came over after dinner and the fun began with kingly children following the star around the house  (Jim is always the star - he just carried the one from our tree this year.)  They marched while holding our magi and singing "We Three Kings."  The star stopped over our party table where baby Jesus awaited the magi.  Christmas Crackers, Kings Cake and Lamb's Wool were the simple elements of the celebration.

Rowan and Isaac helped to make this star garland.  We used wax paper and ironed crayon shavings between the layers.  I then cut stars and hot glued them to twine.

The Christmas crackers were a last minute addition and we so loved that we all ended up with crowns!  I'll be on the look out for more next year!

I made the King's cake from Let Us Keep The Feast: Living the Church Year at Home (Complete Collection)
this year.  It was different than one's I've made before and equally yummy.  I have no idea which we'll do next year.

The boys ended the evening by filling their shoes with grass for the camels.  They are so very eager to see what the wise men will leave! 

 On Epiphany itself we plan on getting take out (from the east) for dinner and chalking our door.  There is a service at church we are hoping to attend at seven, which is late for our boys, but I'm hopeful we can somehow make it work.

Epiphany

This is the first year where I've thought of this stretch of ordinary time between Christmas and Lent as Epiphany.  It isn't as if I didn't know it was called that, but I'm really taken with the idea of allowing the manifestation of Christ to spill forward from the day of Epiphany until the beginning of lent (just as the incarnation spills into the twelve days of Christmas and the mystery of Easter spills into six more weeks).  We've always tried to study the life and ministry of Christ during this time that leads to Lent and Resurrection day, but this idea of allowing Christ to become manifest in our lives during this time has a new meaning and energy for me right now.

I designed this banner for ordinary time in the summer.  I wanted the image of the tree growing, partly because my ordinary time baby's name is that of a tree (Rowan) and partly because I love the way godly play calls ordinary time "The Great Green Growing Time".  So the tree and the spiral were already planned in the summer, but then as I went to stitch the spiral after Christmas I realized that an epiphany star was needed at the center.  I love the image of the spiral for christian growth.  We are always learning and growing closer to God and realizing more and more of who He is - Epiphany!

A Joyful Epiphany

I hope you all had a lovely Epiphany!  We had a joyful day, though with school/work starting back up today it was a bit different in years past.  Celebration really began last night when we shared the book Small Camel Follows the Star after a Twelfth Night feast of crepes (the boys request) and the boys filled their shoes with carrots and celery for the magi's camels.

I had these camels arranged differently, but Jonah insisted that they needed to be traveling west and repositioned them.

The boys were delighted to discover that their shoes held a few gold coins and a book/puzzle as a gift from the wisemen this morning. 

I sent crown cookies to Jonah's class to keep the celebration going for him in school.  I also sent them a kite-paper epiphany star to hang.  I bought kite paper several years ago to make stars and only got around to making them yesterday.  They are so beautiful when the light shines through the paper.  I gave a couple away and hung several through the house. 

This evening I made Jim's favorite dinner while the boys decorated paper crowns.  After dinner we followed one of our stars, carrying our wise men figurines to find baby Jesus, all the while singing "We Three Kings". 

We enjoyed Kings Cake for the first time this year and it was really yummy for dessert.   I'm looking forward to a piece with coffee for breakfast tomorrow, as   the recipe I made is basically a extra yummy cinnamon roll in the round.

Planning Epiphany

We're in Texas visiting family for a few days and headed home tomorrow.  I've been thinking a lot about twelfth night dinner and Epiphany.  I always feel like I'm posting after the holiday here, which is fun to share, but not very helpful, so here's a quick attempt to start the conversation a bit earlier.

I just made an Epiphany pinterest board with lots of ideas, more than I'll actually get to I'm sure, so I thought I'd share it here!

We are looking forward to reading a few of our favorite Epiphany books. These are the two that I think of right away, though many of the nativity books have lovely depictions of the kings as well.
Small Camel Follows the Star by Rachel Brown
We Three Kings by Gennady Spirin

Here are past posts on celebrating Epiphany.

What are your favorite Epiphany traditions and crafts?

The End of the Twelve Days

I really do love celebrating the twelve days of Christmas.  It isn't feasting every day and making every moment of every day feel like Christmas.  There is lots of real work on these days and lots of what feels like ordinary time.  But, there are moments of every day that we set aside to bask in the newness of Christ's birth.  Sometimes the moments are planned and sometimes they just happen and sometimes the moments that are planned don't happen.  But, in the end it feels like we've really been welcoming a new baby, a new joy.  Yes, it was a lot of work to fix turkey dinner for our Epiphany feast with three kids underfoot and I wish Jim could have taken more time off, but it was good enough.  

When each of my babes has arrived I've hoped for serene time where Jim and I can just bond and soak in the newness of this little person we are welcoming into the world.  But, never are all the moments serene, there is too much work and too little sleep for that.  And welcoming Isaac this time around, I counted on this reality, and it wasn't as hard.  I've just felt grateful for the moments when we all delight in his newness and often at the same time, delighted in the gift of all three of these little men.

And learning that lesson this time around in my own motherhood, has given me a whole lot of peace these last twelve days.  No, we didn't think about Christ's birth every moment, but there were moments when we did ponder Christ's arrival.  We found moments to celebrate the gift of the baby born in Bethlehem and it was good!

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I think that one of the highlights of the twelve days this year was the book The Thirteen days of Christmas.  I'd recommend it highly, just as a fun story for Christmas time, and especially for anyone who wants to celebrate the twelve days.  I'm not sure how many of the traditions were local or even made up, but it helped me see how all the days hold together and how many of the days have a particular focus (i.e. Holy Innocents Day, St. Stephen's Day, Adam's Day, Eve's Day...)

So, I can't find much about Adam and Eve's Days online, so perhaps they were local or made up, but I liked the idea.  We ate apples on Adam's day, the boys got special treats (these first two were traditions from the book) and we read the story of the fall from Genesis after dinner.

Our apple dip is a favorite snack around here - some cream cheese, a wee bit of honey and a dash of vanilla.

Twelfth Night we left our shoes out with grass for the camels and the Wisemen filled them with a sweet each, and a book for the boys.  Well, that was the plan, and then a few days before Epiphany Jonah said "I hope the wise men bring me one of those video games that you can hold." (I have no idea where he even saw one of those!)  Anyway, for multiple reasons I have no intention of buying him a video game system of any type, but I did break down and buy the boys one pound calculators.  I couldn't bear the thought of Jonah being disappointed, and he was thrilled!  We gave him math problems all day and Rowan thinks his is a phone, which was fun in another way.

And now, I'm looking toward plow monday.  The treats are being disposed of (mostly eaten), the decorations are being put away, and I'm making lists to help us get into a new routine.  I'm feeling a need for a more structured rhythm now that I'm trying to keep house and care for three little boys.

Happy Epiphany to you All!!!

A Holiday Recap

It was a very mellow Christmas season and at moments I found myself wishing for home and the excitement of the five grandchildren under five on my side.  Jim and I have decided that we don't want to be traveling every Christmas as we want to build traditions for our own little family based on the church year.  This year was the first year that I felt like we really succeeded in fully holding the space of Advent, the 12 days and Epiphany.  It definitely is a process adding in these traditions.  I was particularly pleased with Advent this year; once I gave up most of the slew of the gifts I had planned to make I was able to really focus on creating the advent space meaningfully.

As for the twelve days of Christmas and Epiphany here are some things I was thankful for...

:Cinnamon Rolls shaped as a Christmas tree are my family's Christmas morning tradition, but this year I opted out of that tradition and made a very simple breakfast cake (the Blueberry Buttermilk cake from Apples for Jam - Yum!)  I've made rolls the past few years, but it has always been late on Christmas Eve and it has felt rushed and I haven't enjoyed it.  So this year I decided that this is one of the joys of celebrating all 12 days - we had Cinnamon Rolls a couple times, just not on Christmas morning.  I also opted to make turkey dinner for Epiphany so I wasn't roasting a Turkey on Christmas day.

 : Our 12 days of giving quests went well.  The best days were the simplest and most tangible.  At four, giving tinned food to a box in the store isn't overly meaningful.  But, mixing icing for cinnamon rolls and making coffee to surprise daddy was incredibly exciting.   We also particularly enjoyed sharing food with the birds.

: December's 'One Small Change' - We had a paperless Christmas for the first time.  Some things came from family wrapped, but I made bags for our gifts (just sewed on three sides, pinked the top edge and used loose ribbon to tie around the bag - very simple).  The boys loved opening the bags and maybe some year I'll hem the edges and I would love to collect red, black and white folksy fabrics to make more from.

 :Games, Games and more Games - fortunately for us Jonah loves games as much as we do and we played lots of them through the holidays.  Jonah is particularly into chess right now (not Mum's favorite game, but oh well) and spent hours going through his new chess book setting up scenarios and doing chess puzzles.

:Some holiday crafting: I made Jonah a felt beaver for all the Narnia play he's been doing with his tree house.  He is requesting a Mrs. Beaver now... we'll see when I get to that.  

Jonah learned how to knit with a knitting fork - you can see his knitted necklace peaking out from beneath his shirt in the picture below.

:Epiphany - We had a lovely Epiphany to end our holidaying.  Making crowns is always a highlight for us and this year Jonah made the star for us to follow as well.  We have a tradition of following a star on a string through the house singing 'We Three Kings' and then sharing the story of the Magi.

Celebrating Epiphany

We've been attempting to build traditions around the twelve days of Christmas. The last day of Christmas is Epiphany, which is the day of the wise men.

Some friends told us about the custom of filling shoes on Dia de Reyes with grass for the wisemens' camels. The wisemen then leave gifts in return.

We forgot to have Jonah fill his shoes the night before. So, before dinner on Epiphany we told him to fill his shoes. He did. He then proceeded to fine everyone else's shoes and fill those too. Luckily the wisemen had some extra candy for all those extra shoes!

Jonah pasted Gems on crowns for every one before dinner. We had breakfast for dinner. I attempted to make the pancakes in the shape of crowns with Blueberries for gems. I also made the Italian Grotto Eggs from "A Homemade Life" - so yummy!

After dinner Jonah was delighted to find that the wise men had left him a book and three candies to represent the gold, frankincense and Myrrh.

We then read the story of the wise men from Matthew, which put someone to sleep.

Happy Epiphany!