CHRIST THE KING PARISH

A Catholic Guide to the Traditional 40 Days of Christmas

The high festive days of Christmas have passed. We have sung Christmas carols at Mass, in the car and in our homes. We have spent joyous hours with family and friends. We have presented gifts to each other. We have eaten more cookies than we care to admit.

And here in Minnesota, Gustav Holst’s adaption of Christina Rossetti’s A Christmas Carol rings true, for snow has fallen, “snow on snow, snow on snow on snow.” Our long, cold winter is one of the many reasons I have embraced the traditional celebration of what Dom Prosper Guéranger, in The Liturgical Year, calls “these Forty Days of Christmas” — the time that spans from “our Saviour’s Birth even to the day of Our Lady’s Purification.”

Susanna Spencer

National Catholic Register

The Chalking of the Doors: An Epiphany Tradition Explained

If you’re a Catholic, you’ve probably seen it: a mysterious series of letters and numbers, looking for all the world like an equation, inscribed in chalk over a doorway at your parish, or at the home of a friend. Maybe you thought you could figure it out. Maybe you were too embarrassed to ask, “What the heck is that?”

If you don’t know what the chalk is all about, don’t be ashamed. You’re certainly not alone.

Epiphany (also known as Twelfth Night, Theophany, or Three Kings Day) marks the occasion of a time-honored Christian tradition of “chalking the doors.” The formula for the ritual — adapted for 2020 — is simple: take chalk of any color and write the following above the entrance of your home: 20 + C + M + B + 20.

Jamie Skojec

OnePeterFive