Celebrating Jesus all year
My family had an Epiphany this weekend.
We don’t have a whole lot of traditions as a family. We have rules—no screens on Sunday, no sleepovers on school nights—but we don’t have a lot of special things we do regularly to celebrate something. This year, we’re filling in that space a little bit by turning to the old church calendar. We’re celebrating some of the early church festivals that commemorate the life and work of Jesus with food, crafts, and memorable conversations.
Finding focus at Christmas
This all started with the typical, near-universal Christmas frustration: “Why do my kids get so caught up in the materialism and mythology of Christmas, and have such a hard time being generous and thankful?” I bemoaned. “Why isn’t the gift of Jesus enough?” It seems like no matter how many times you try to say, “we’re celebrating Jesus’ birthday,” all the lights, presents and extra stuff grab kids’ attention much more firmly.
I think that in decades past, our culture still carried enough of the taste of Christ that the true meaning of Christmas shone through even amid all the non-Jesus junk surrounding the holiday. Maybe somewhere along the line we crossed a tipping point where that’s not true anymore, and if you’re not incredibly intentional about how you celebrate Christmas with your kids, the noise drowns out the signal. We need a lot more signal and a lot less noise. How do you find that without Scrooging up your Christmas by taking all the fun out of it?
In Orbit on Thanksgiving weekend, we watched a Phil Vischer video called “Why Do We Call It Christmas?” and one of the musical numbers stuck in my head. The song retraced the history of Christmas as “Christ’s Mass,” one celebration in a whole liturgical season that celebrates aspects of Jesus’ life. Why, I asked myself, has this one particular spot on the liturgy persisted through time and transcended even the religious/secular boundary? What would happen if we lived Christmas as one important point on a continuum of holy celebrations? Could we practice celebrating Jesus on a more regular basis so that when we come to Christmas (and Easter, too) we see it first and most as a festival in Jesus’ honor, and everything else as a pointer to him?
The traditional church calendar
So I did a little research, looking into the other festival days that the church of Jesus celebrated back in the old days. A lot of these traditions are still carried on by liturgical churches in traditions different from mine. Some of those traditions add a whole lot of other holy days to the mix. Maybe that’s why these other dates don’t rise to the prominence that Easter and Christmas do.
But traditions and practices have a purpose. They were intended to remind people of the reality of Jesus’ life. In a world without literacy, tactile, visible practices turned the events of Jesus’ life into embodied experiences that people could share, repeat and remember. I would love for my kids to have that, too.
What is Epiphany?
So, Epiphany. This ancient feast day wraps up the Christmas season, and in fact many people use this day to mark when it’s time to take down the Christmas decorations. Symbolically, Epiphany celebrates two occurrences in Jesus’ life: the visit of the Wise Men (Matthew 2) and Jesus’ baptism (Matthew 3:13-17, Mark 1:9-11). Eventually these events were separated into their own celebrations, but the word “epiphany” means “an experience of a sudden and striking realization” and that’s happening in both stories, isn’t it? The wise men, suddenly aware that they are in the presence of the Son of God, open their treasures and honor Him. The people present at Jesus’ baptism hear God Himself pronounce “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Rather than try to untangle these two events about 28 years apart, we chose to celebrate them both.
One of my favorite things about this “feast days” project has been looking into how Jesus-followers in other time periods and other parts of the world celebrate. Many of these feast days have particular foods associated with them, which makes sense—if you really want to remember something, making and eating a special food goes a long way. From Germany to Portugal to New Orleans, believers celebrate Epiphany by baking “king cakes”—ring-shaped cakes (more like bread if you ask me) decorated with colored sugar. People hid a bean or figure of a baby inside their cakes to represent how Mary and Joseph had to hide Jesus from Herod’s soldiers shortly after the Wise Men departed (Matthew 2:13). The person who found the baby in their slice got to be “king for the day.” A sweet baked good that doubles as a treasure hunt AND tells a true story about Jesus? Sign us up!
Epiphany at the Rohrback house
So we made the king cake:
I am not much of a kitchen whiz, but when you’re making something your kids have never tried before, and they know there’s a secret prize hidden inside, it’s easy to get them involved. I used this recipe, which actually yielded two cakes, so we could try two different fillings (one cinnamon, one cream cheese). I, um, learned a lot about the right and (mostly) wrong ways to roll these up. Next year’s will be better.
Once the cakes were done (it took a whole afternoon with all the waiting for dough to rise), we had a little impromptu family devotion with our treat. We talked about the meaning of the word “epiphany,” which for kids boils down to “a holy wow moment.” This reminded us of one of our favorite Orbit songs, “The God of Wow,” so the kids led us adults (that’s me, my wife and her parents) through the motions for the song. I used this devotion from Northside Christian Church, which gave all us adults the chance to talk about our own epiphanies—times when we came face-to-face with the reality of who Jesus was. Then we ate cake. And nobody found the baby…
…until the second round, after supper, when the figure popped out of the cake squarely between the pieces I was cutting for the twins. So both of them got to be “king for the day,” although there wasn’t much “day” left at that point.
Celebrating Epiphany was new for me and for our family, and I’m hopeful that something of that “holy wow” will stay with us. The kids are still finishing off the leftover cake at breakfast this week, making room in the fridge for our next liturgical adventure: The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, also known as Candlemas, which is three weeks away on Feb. 2. Apparently in Mexico it’s traditional to make tamales for this celebration. And we have more than enough broken crayons lying around our house to make some homemade candles, too, to celebrate Jesus being proclaimed as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:22-38).
Sounds like a party. Who’s bringing the corn husks?
Feasts of Jesus Christ and a few traditions I’ve found
- Epiphany (aka Three Kings Day, Baptism of Jesus, Wedding at Cana) — 6 January (make king cake, draw chalk blessings)
- Presentation of Jesus at the Temple — 2 February (make/light candles; in Mexico they eat tamales)
- The Raising of Lazarus — Saturday before Palm Sunday, April 12, 2025 (the Greeks make lazarakia, put flowers in water)
- Palm Sunday — April 13, 2025 (have a palm procession; eat figs and/or salt cod; clean house in the three days following)
- Easter — April 20, 2025 (ham supper with family and friends)
- Ascension of Jesus — May 29, 2025 (eat a family meal in an elevated place, like a picnic)
- Pentecost — June 8, 2025 (wear red, cook outside using fire)
- Transfiguration of Jesus — 6 August (take a nature hike; eat grapes—this one is celebrated in Lutheran churches right before Ash Wednesday, but following the Orthodox/Anglican calendar here spaces these special days out much more nicely)
- Feast of the Cross — 14 September (eat something with basil in it)
- Christmas — 25 December (we’re fine-tuning an advent calendar in which every day points us to the joy of Jesus coming)