Peace, Jimmie

Today, Epiphany, in Bulgaria thousands of young men dive for crucifixes that priests toss into freezing cold lakes and rivers. Old tradition is that those who come up clutching the cross will enjoy a year of blessing. Until seeing this in today’s news, it had slipped my mind that this also is the annual Epiphany event in Tarpon Springs, Florida, an exciting day that Jimmie J. Nichols, a Greek friend in Apalachicola, urged me to drive down to Tarpon Springs and experience. Jimmie would have gone with me, but we never did. 

In our Western Church, Epiphany has been observed with Matthew 2:1-12, the visit of the magi to the Christ child in Bethlehem. This has settled down into “We three kings of orient are, bearing gifts, we traverse afar,” acclaimed as “the manifestation of Christ to the gentiles,” and made the last fling of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Everybody’s Christmas tree should come down today.

At some stage when I was a boy it was my job to take the Christmas tree out. Dragging it out of the living room, always with a few icicles still clinging, left the living room floor carpeted with needles, some green some brown, and the final pull through the front door, always an explosion of dead pine needles. There was no Christmas tree pickup in those days, so I always dragged the tree across the front yard into the woods between us and the Moore house next door, and left it there. Once or twice I set it upright thinking to play Christmas with it, never did. Usually I disconnected the Christmas tree stand and set it just under the house ready for next year. 

My mother had a saying about taking the Christmas tree down, but I don’t recall whether it was bad luck to have it up on New Year's Day, or good luck to leave it up until the New Year. Mama grew up Baptist, not observing Epiphany, so either way, nothing to do with January 6.

Epiphany in the Eastern Church is observed not with the magi but in the older pre-Christmas tradition, as the Baptism of the Lord, which is what the ceremony of blessing the water then diving into water for a cross or crucifix is about. And actually, our church has come round to the celebrating mainly the two grand epiphanies, the Baptism of the Lord and his Transfiguration on the Mountaintop. One reason is that our celebrations are on Sunday and if we offer a midweek January 6 service nobody comes. My hope for Epiphany is always that we sing some of our beautiful old Epiphany season hymns that are so wonderful to sing and hear, that only come round once a year.

Peace, Jimmie.

TW+