{"id":58811,"date":"2022-01-13T07:00:18","date_gmt":"2022-01-13T13:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/?p=58811"},"modified":"2022-01-17T17:51:07","modified_gmt":"2022-01-17T23:51:07","slug":"additional-ideas-on-the-christmas-octave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2022\/01\/13\/additional-ideas-on-the-christmas-octave\/","title":{"rendered":"Additional Ideas on the Christmas Octave"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few days before Christmas I posted my thoughts on St. Stephen’s day, the fairly new feast of the Holy Family, and the rubrics around the Christmas Octave<\/a>. The comments by PrayTell<\/em> readers raised a lot of interesting aspects, and some of you even contacted me privately.<\/p>\n

Some voted for the old practice of celebrating two feasts at once, as it was custom before the Second Vatican Council e.g. by doubling of the collects in the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours. I am not familiar with this practice from my own experience and I tend to believe that this is a little too much against the Council’s option for clarity and comprehensibility in the Roman rite\u2014unlike e.g. the Byzantine rite where even Good Friday, Holy Saturday, or Easter Sunday can coincide with the Solemnity of the Annunciation on March 25 (with a lot of rubricistic challenges).<\/p>\n

A colleague wrote to me that if we regard Jesus’ birth in a human family as a divine revelation, then the feast of the Holy Family should clearly have more weight than St. Stephen.<\/p>\n

I had not known that not only some Eastern churches celebrate St. Stephen on December 27, but also some Anglican churches transferred St. Stephen to December 29 or the Sunday after Christmas.<\/p>\n

And then even more oddities came to my mind:<\/p>\n

I have never understood why the feast days in the Christmas Octave are celebrated in such a strange way: The Lauds are from the feast, the Vespers are from Christmas\u2014I mean: Is this an octave or not? Is it a feast day or not? Is the morning different from the evening, and if so, then: why? All this looks very arbitrary as if the calendar wants too much at the same time.<\/p>\n

And maybe the most profound: When Pope John XXIII. introduced the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, in 1960 for January 1, the Roman church refrained from the memorial of the circumcision and naming of Jesus; although on this very day the respective Gospel is still read according to the biblical chronology: the eighth day since Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:21). Recently several theologians and even bishops in Germany have pleaded for a reintroduction of the Solemnity of Naming and Circumcision of the Lord, not only because of its ecumenical tradition, but also with regard to the Jewish roots and theological background of Christianity that too many Christians have forgotten. With all due respect to the Mother of God: Do we really need an additional feast for her, especially when she is a part of the Holy Family anyway?<\/p>\n

Eventually I had a completely new idea and I would like to know what PrayTell<\/em> readers think of it: What if we created a more continuous and consistent Christmas octave where the liturgy brings up certain aspects of Incarnation as well as traditional feasts that have (more or less) always had a calendrical connection to Christmas?<\/p>\n

For a full liturgical octave we need eight celebrations. We already have:<\/p>\n