I was planning to make this first post in over two years a "catching up" post. And I will get to that, eventually. But I felt inspired to share some thoughts on this joyous time, the Christmas Octave. One of my favorite things about my Catholic faith is the way we celebrate the liturgical year, sometimes referred to as the Church year. After a beautiful and hectic, though somewhat prayerful Advent, the Church sets aside the eight days from Christmas to the feast of Mary, Mother of God (January 1) as a sacred space of sorts. The term octave refers to those eight days, and in the church, they are viewed as one long Christmas Day. Now, obviously, many people can't take eight days off from work to observe the Octave, but they can continue Christmas when they are at home. I'm very blessed to be able to celebrate it, even in the midst of getting life back to normal, since we homeschool, and take our break until after New Year's Day. Now that the hustle of buying, wrapping, and, to some degree, baking is over, and the great day has arrived, we have more than just the one day to enjoy it. We keep our tree up until Epiphany on December 6, and I try to keep some decorations up through most of January, as the Christmas season doesn't truly end until the feast of the Presentation of the Lord on February 2. We've turned our Jesse tree of Advent to a "12 Days of Christmas" tree, decorated each day with a different ornament from an ornament exchange we participated in years ago.
Since I didn't have time to post a Christmas tree "tour" before Christmas, here are some pictures of our tree and the ornaments that are most special to us:
We bought our tree at Costco this year. As much as I want to support small tree suppliers, we just couldn't afford to spend upwards of $75 for a tree, when they were around $40 at Costco.
This little angel ornament is one we had in my family growing up. Mom let me pick an ornament from my childhood to use in my adult home, and this one made me remember so many happy Christmases.
Jim and I went to Disney World on our honeymoon (Jim has always been a big Walt Disney-as-an-artist fan), and we bought this ornament there. I think one of the kids broke it years ago, so it's been glued back together at least once.
This was given to my oldest son, Nicholas, on St. Nicholas Day when he was just maybe two years old. Of course, as the oldest, he received ornaments, but none of his siblings have any that are just for them. Sorry, guys!
I bought this little truck at
Linton's Enchanted Gardens, a special garden center/gift shop/petting zoo that my mom and I like to visit a couple times a year
One year, I actually succeeded in getting my kids to hand-make ornaments during Advent. These are the traditional cinnamon and glue cut-out ones that smell really good. Or did when they were new, anyway.
One of the ornaments either Paul or Patrick made in a co-op we attended one year.
This is our very special tree-topper. We bought it about 30 years ago from Abbey Press. It's supposed to light up, but the lights no longer work. Anyway, I don't know if you can even find them anymore, but as a relatively new Catholic, I was thrilled to put Mary and Jesus on the top of our tree!
These two are special Mother and Child ornaments I found at a Franciscan gift shop sale at a Franciscan festival we helped with a couple of years ago. I especially love the one with part of the Magnificat on it.
We have many more ornaments, really too many, in fact. It was hard to find space for all of them! These are some of my favorites, though.
So we spend these special days of the Christmas octave gazing at our lovely tree, eating cookies (and baking more, because we go through a lot of cookies with teenagers in the house, still listening to Christmas music, watching Christmas movies, and enjoying some down time with one another.
