Epiphany:  The End of the Christmas Season

The decorations are falling.  Like leaves a season earlier, the tinsel, ornaments and cheap plastic angels produced by puzzled Chinese Buddhists fall to the ground.  The once-proud colors and lights are being boxed up and put away.  The wrapping paper is in the trash; garment boxes are carefully folded, stored, and forgotten. The airwaves once plagued by carols are again a top-40 wasteland.  Our lives slow down and resume their normal pace.

It's not even New Year's yet.

The Christmas feeling was late coming to us this year.  The tree was up by December first; the decorations came three weeks later.  It's only now, as the craziness drops to a manageable roar, that we're able to take stock of what happened with the holidays.

Light is a fundamental part of all the winter holiday celebrations.  We remember and acknowledge the Light of God in multicultural splendor.   These holidays purposely occur as the long darkness begins to recede.  It's routine, yet miraculous - the nights get shorter and light comes back into the world.  It is a religious symbol writ large.  The natural symbol and the religious light are deus ex machina.  Humans don't create it - we are just spectators.

The lights were spun about the tree in a confusion of children's limbs just three days before Christmas.  It was then that it really started to feel like Christmas.  That was the day I began humming carols.

Though the Light of God came into this world by supernatural means, we humans keep the light in this world through our symbols, our work.   Ultimately, the spirit of Christmas isn't delivered by a fat, red-suited, undead bishop, but by our own hands, our own spirits.

I am still humming the Christmas carols, four days after Christmas.  It's only after the glamour and gifts, after the tinsel and trees, that we have the mental space to reflect on these truths. 

The realization arrives on camelback with three wanderers from Africa (first wizards, then astrologers, perhaps simply safely kings).  It is after the busyness that the wisdom arrives, and it is then that we finally have our Epiphany.