This year, I had the joy of spending the holidays at home with my twin 3 year olds, and the funny thing about 3 year olds is that their sense of time is a bit…wobbly. Tomorrow, and next month, and never are all kind of the same. Yesterday and last year blur together. Especially for my very imaginative little boy, things that happened, things he read in a book, and things that I told him were going to happen, all sort of mix together in his constant narration of his day. 

So, for my kids, Christmas didn’t end on the 25th. It began. In the days after Christmas, my children’s play was filled with pretending to sleep and then wake up to find Santa had come, with carting around a doll they called “babyjesus.” Performances of “Jingle Bells” and discussions of all things Christmas have stretched into the early days of January. And I have loved it. Partially because it takes some of the pressure off of Christmas morning, and partially ` because it has made me notice the liturgical season of Christmas in a way I never have before. 

For those who aren’t deeply tied to a liturgical calendar, the Christmas season technically begins on December 25th and extends twelve days, until today, January 6th – Epiphany. From a strictly liturgical perspective, my toddlers are the only ones who are appropriately celebrating the holiday, rehashing the wonder of Christmas over and over, as though they can barely believe it all really happened. 

It has had me reflecting on the ways we can celebrate beginnings and miss the wonder in all that unfolds after the beginning. How we can quickly move on, bounce back, and rush ourselves back to normal, when extraordinary beginnings (a birth, a rebirth, a launch, a new chapter) may call us just to bask in them a little longer. How we may be called to let remarkable things wash over us, and not rush on to the next chapter too soon. 

The story of Christ’s birth isn’t the climax of the story of God’s inbreaking love and Kingdom, it isn’t the high-water mark, followed by an inevitable let-down. It is a beginning, an opening into a whole new way of God being in the world. It is the day in which the story as we know it really begins. When we tell the story of Christmas, it’s not like a Thanksgiving play where we reflect on a thing that happened once (if ever) and try to catch an echo of it, it’s more like a wedding anniversary, where a couple out at dinner regales an unsuspecting waiter with the story of how they met, every year more grateful for the strikingly ordinary and transformative series of circumstances that brought them together. 

As we celebrate this Epiphany holiday, and begin a new year on the calendar, I hope we give ourselves the space to not rush on from the moments that have shaped us. I hope we let beginnings, births, anniversaries, be invitations to bask in the memories of the moments that have made us, and wonder about what our next chapter will look like. You don’t have to go back to normal right away, you don’t have to be so focused on the future that your past and present aren’t allowed their proper space. 

Over the weekend, we made a whole production of having the twins say “night night” to the Christmas tree, and I found myself wondering how I had ever put it away without ritual before. I found myself grateful for the season, all of it, in a way I hadn’t been since I was a child, and felt a warm holiday glow to carry me just a little bit farther into the year. I hope your Epiphany feels the same.