12 Days of Christmas Celebrations

The most exciting thing about Christmas in the Catholic faith (well other than the birth of Jesus of course) is that we really have 12 days to celebrate!  We start the true Christmas celebration on Christmas - December 25th and continue until Epiphany - January 6th.  Here are a few SIMPLE ways that we like to celebrate during these 12 days!  We also leave our Christmas tree and decorations until after the Epiphany as we continue to celebrate!

Christmas:  We try to make sure that the focus of our Christmas day is surrounding the birth of Jesus!  We go to mass as a family and then open our Christmas presents as a family.  We have decided the past few years that we get three Christmas presents for each child to represent the three gifts from the Wisemen.  It helps to keep the amount of presents under control and gives purpose as well.  We celebrate gifts from St Nicholas on his feast day, so the children have already celebrated that part of the Christmas season by the time we get to Christmas Day!

We bake a birthday cake for baby Jesus and sing Happy Birthday!  We also add baby Jesus to our nativity set, because during Advent we display a pregnant Mary figurine.  The children also get to put Baby Jesus in their sacrifice manger filled with hay and sing "Away in a Manger".  The rest of the day we just try to relax and spend quality time together as a family!  See our Christmas Celebration HERE!

Celebrating Baby Jesus's Birthday last year

1.  12 days of Christmas:  Remember all of the lovely ornaments that I have from JesseTreeTreasures that I use during Advent?  We use these ornaments for Our Jesse Tree and also for reflection upon O Antiphons.  Well she also has one for celebrating the 12 days of Christmas!  They are lovely and have a great little reflection with them! 

 

2.  Feast of the Holy Innocents:  We celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 28th when young male children were murdered in Bethlehem by King Herod according to the Gospel of Matthew.  This day is also our son's birthday, so it's really a celebration day at our house!  We take time this day to pray for the innocent who have been prosecuted in the past and for those who are prosecuted today!

Feast of the Holy Innocents

3.  Feast of the Holy Family:  This feast is celebrated on December 29th and we celebrate Mary, Joseph, and Jesus together as a family.  This is a great day to relax with a fun family activity to show appreciation to our Holy Family!

 

The Holy Family

 

4. Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God:  This feast day is on January 1st and is a Holy Day of Obligation when we celebrate Mary's motherhood of Jesus.  We go to Mass and also say the rosary in prayers of thanksgiving for Mary.  Also, since this feast day is on January 1st, we also use this day to pick our family Saint of the Year!  Together we pick a saint that we will pray to as a family and learn more about.  This past year we had chosen St Luke, the patron saint of physicians as our son Luke had just been born and my husband was completing his medical training!

We have this print in our nursery at our home


5.  St Elizabeth Ann Seton:  We celebrate the feast day of St Elizabeth Ann Seton on January 4th!  Since we began homeschooling with Seton Home Study School, we have really loved learning more about this saint!  We even were able to visit her shrine when my husband and I visited New York City this November!  We will take this day to praise St. Elizabeth Ann Seton for her gifts as a mother, wife and educator! 

 6.  Epiphany:  Ever since I was a little girl this was my favorite Catholic feast day because it is celebrated on January 6th, my birthday (It's kind of crazy that we have two family birthdays already during the 12 days of Christmas)!  It is on the Epiphany that we celebrate the visit of the Magi to Baby Jesus and also Jesus' physical manifestation to the Gentiles as the Son of God. 

There is so much to do to celebrate Epiphany, one of my favorites being the blessing of your home.  There are special prayers to say, and then you take a piece of chalk (you can have your priest bless it) and you write the initials of the three Wise Men (Caspar, Melchoir, Balthasar), connected with Crosses, over the inside of your front door.  You then write the year, breaking up the numbers of the year so they fall on both sides of the initials.  You leave this marking on your door until Pentecost, which this next year is Sunday May 24th.

So for this year you would write 20 C+M+B 15

It is also believed that the King's initials also stand for "Christus mansionem benedicat" ("Christ bless this house").  You can also make a King's Cake, which is a cake baked in a tube pan to look like a crown.  You can also put a little trinket inside and anyone who finds it inside is "King for the Day"!

We also make sure to leave our nativity set up (and all of our Christmas decorations) and take special time to talk about the wisemen's journey to Bethlehem.  We also have a set of Candles from Dayspring with the Nativity, Shepards and Wisemen that we use throughout Advent/Christmas.



Our "Blessing of our Home" Last Year

Ryan with our Three Wiseman Candle

Those are some of the fun ways that we celebrate during the 12 days of Christmas!  What are some of your fun family traditions during this time of the liturgical year?