It’s still Christmas, so here’s carol #5

Liturgically speaking, it is still Christmas.  It will be until Epiphany (hence, the twelve days of Christmas, which come after the holiday, not before).  (Easter also has a season, which lasts forty days until the feast of the Ascension; more important feast = longer season, just as its prepatory period (Lent) is longer than Christmas’s [...]

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Merry Christmas (and 100th post and carol #4)

Merry Christmas!
This is also my 100th post, so I’d like to thank everyone who’s been reading.  To guess from the statistics, I think there may be about two dozen regular readers out there.  Some days, there are many, many more.  I hope y’all have been enjoying it.
Here’s a Christmas card from me.  The kids helped [...]

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Christmas Carol #3 and Gaudete Sunday

Happy Gaudete Sunday!
“Huh?” many of you are thinking.  Ok, I’ll explain.  Both Lent and (surprise) Advent are penitential seasons, so the color for the liturgical vestments in the Catholic Church is purple.  Since Easter is the most important celebration in the church year, the preparation period (Lent) is longer, forty days (which also has a [...]

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Christmas carol #2

Happy feast of the Immaculate Conception!  In honor of the feast, I offer “The Basque Carol,” also known by its first line, “The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came.”  Yes, properly, the song sort of belongs in March, for the feast of the Annunciation, but that feast obviously relates very closely to Christmas.  The text comes from the [...]

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Christmas carol #1

Sitting through the tambourines at the end of mass (our usual Advent song, “Rise Up, Jerusalem,” involves tambourines… which I guess is slightly better than the bongo drums our previous parish used for, “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning”), I started thinking of all the really great Advent and Christmas music out there (none of which, [...]

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