‘Tis Still the Season to Be Jolly

Happy New Year! I’m so excited for the new Epiphany Breakfast Pageant we are inaugurating this Sunday, and I hope you are, too.

It’s a funny thing about the Feast of the Epiphany: On the one hand, it closes the celebration of the Christmas season. But, traditionally, it was also the start of a whole new season of celebration. With more darkness and the coldest days  still ahead, our forebears wisely kept festivities going at least through Candlemas (Feb 2) if not all the way to the start of Lent, with Carnival season ending on Mardi Gras. It’s a modern mistake to strip away all the pretty lights, good food, and merry-making, just as winter is really setting in.

A big part of such Epiphanytide (yes, that’s a word) festivities was that they helped people to stay connected to other people. In the winter, seasonal depression can be exacerbated by the isolation that comes from wanting to semi-hibernate indoors — understandable though that urge is.

So, in addition to our reveling this Sunday, we will soon begin a new Spiritual Growth series called Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Each Sunday after service, we will have a different fun activity to actively build more and deeper connections between ourselves and our surrounding neighborhoods. Stay tuned for more details!

In the mean time, I encourage you to find ways of keeping your spirit bright this season. Think of it as an inverse Lent: adopt some “disciplines” for making merry from now until Ash Wednesday on March 5.