This post was originally published in January 2014. It is revised and now includes the 1962 Calendar dates for Christmas. This post contains tables which may not be easily displayed on mobile devices. The Christmas season ended on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Or did it? It seems...

(From the archives: This post was originally written in January 2016. It is updated to reflect the Christmas 2020-21 season.) “On the 8th day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...“ Everyone is familiar with the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” And although some...

I clearly recall a Lenten sermon from my childhood during which the priest shared a statistic that chocolate stores are more profitable during Lent than the rest of year. At the beginning of Lent many people make the resolutions to give up sweets resulting in slow sales. By mid-Lent these...

From the archives, originally posted March 30, 2016: This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it, alleluia! With the whole Church we rejoice at the resurrection of Christ! The Church celebrates the Easter season or Eastertide. St. Athanasius said “[t]he fifty...

Reposting this from the 2015 archives to celebrate the feast of the Trinity: As the Liturgical Year returns to the “Season of the Year” or “Ordinary Time,” the pattern does not fall completely into place. The first few Sundays are special solemnities of Our Lord, so...

From the archives: This was originally posted for Passiontide 2016. Yesterday when I dropped my son off for classes at the homeschool co-op in the neighboring parish, we noticed the veiled statues around the church and chapel. Our parish doesn’t follow this tradition, so it was a...

Wednesday of Holy Week is pivotal because it marks the end of Lent. Holy Thursday begins the sacred Triduum—the holiest days of the Church year. The liturgy reflects the beauty of the Paschal mystery and the Passover Feast of Christ. But how is this day spent in popular piety? What do...

A lady should never reveal her age, but for the sake of honest writing I admit I was born in the late 1960s, which means my conscious memory of Mass was in the vernacular. I don’t remember a transition from the Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite in Latin to the Mass in the...

We are now in the beginning of three feasts of March (almost always in Lent) that are not part of the Lenten Season. Two are included in the Sanctoral (saint) Calendar, and only one is integral to the Temporal Calendar (following the life of Christ). These are stand-alone feasts that provide a...

Even Catholics who lived before Vatican Council II would say that Ember Days are one of the most confusing Catholic practices. Ember Days are an extension of our agrarian roots, but were usually seen merely as fast and abstinence days on the calendar. Most Catholics born after 1965 typically have...