Orthodox Christmas

 Serbian Orthodox Christmas

I missed the Orthodox celebration of Christmas this year. I also missed the earlier celebration that comes in December according to the Gregorian calendar. 

My mother passed on just two days before the start of Childermastide...

(December 12, that is. Using the Gregorian calendar I calculate the start of Childermastide - which is the time or tide of the killing of Holy Innocent Children - starting on the eve of December 14th - when the children of Newtown were killed - and extending through December 28th, which day is the proper Childermas, or Feast of the Holy Innocents.)

... and I just never had my heart in the season; the first time in more than 3 score years I had ignored the time of year.

My daughter had a tree and decorations, and my wife and I did attend services at Holy Trinity in Washington, D.C.  It is a Jesuit church and St. Ignatius was mentioned in the sermon, and I started thinking about his works, thinking that I must read up a bit on him.

 Orthodox Christmas in the West Bank, Bethlehem

 Celebration in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral

The Christmas season is sort of my personal view of a complex Coherence, in which all human behaviors do not necessarily agree and coincide, our views may differ - even differ drastically - and we may emphasize the spiritual or the material...

Some people use the season as part of their political ideology, such as condemning some vague monstrous group's "War on Christmas" and stirring up the dullwitted troops with their usurpation of the word "Christmas"... a form of lèse-majesté, I should think.

Celebrating in Lviv, Ukraine

In our celebrations, there is no true, no false, only the behaviors of joy and spiritual exaltation.

In this is the coherence.

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Merry Christmas!

We have been out of town; out of the country, actually. And so we have had my iPhone turned off to avoid the vultures of data roaming charges, and usually do not bother to even crank up the lap-top, using only to store my reading materials.

So we were walking across Sanderling Place in Toronto, just off  The Donway, on the night of January 7. It was well after sunset, which is about 3:00 PM nowadays, it being cloudy again and threatening rain, and it was quite dark. We saw two tall dark figures coming across the walkway from the direction of Lawrence Street, the Congee Queen, and Divine Lashes, heading west along the Paperbirch Walkway.
They were dressed in black, but were wearing brightly colored stoles, that glowed in even the little light that there was available.
"What's today's date?" I asked.
"January 7, " She-who-must-be-obeyed answered.
"It's Christmas..." I said.
"... the Feast of the Epiphany..." she added.
She was thinking Western Rite, and I was suddenly back in the realm of the Eastern Rite: it was Orthodox Christmas!

So merry Christmas!
It marks the beginning of one 12 Day of Christmas while marking the end of another.
This business of multiple calendars and the extenuation of feasts by having a few days between the feasts of different rites is a rather good idea.

 Eve of Orthodox Christmas in Kazan Cathedral in Volgograd

 Palestinian Marching Band at Church of the Nativity in West Bank, Bethlehem

Procession awaiting Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem Metropolitan Theophilos 

outside the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank, Bethlehem

 Saint Porphyrios Orthodox Church in Gaza City

  Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul, Turkey

 Armenian Orthodox Christmas in Iraq, Dohuk Province

Armenian Orthodox Christmas in Aleppo, Syria at Holy Mother of God Church

 Christmas Eve Mass in the St. Volodymyr Cathedral in Kiev, Ukraine

President El-Sisi of Egypt Greeting at Coptic Christmas eve mass led by Pope Tawadros II, the 118th Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of St. Mark Cathedral

 Armenian Orthodox Christmas in Iraq, Dohuk Province

Russia's President Putin at the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God in Turginovo, Tver region, where his parents were baptized more than a century ago
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