Notes on Christmas and Epiphany

by Fr. Mark Wojdelski, FSSP

This is a slight departure from my series of articles on the lunar calendar in order to make some observations about the octave of Christmas. Anyone interested in the lunar calendar can start with the introductory articles: (1) , (2), (3), and (4).  There are more than four articles in the series, but the first four are very important to understanding the conceptual framework.

The twelve days of Christmas have undergone a number of changes over the years. Even comparing a missal from 1862 to one from 1920, one can see significant changes, most of which took place during the reforms introduced by St. Pius X with his bull Divino Afflatu in 1911.

Before 1911, the period from December 25 to January 1 was not just a celebration of the Nativity; it was a series of overlapping octaves, where the Octave of Christmas coexisted with the octaves of the so-called Comites Christi (“Companions of Christ”): St. Stephen, St. John, and the Holy Innocents. These have been described elsewhere (here), but one should realize that by Dec. 29, the feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury, a priest celebrating Mass would have been commemorating four different octaves.

A close study of the rubrics of the octave of Christmas in the pre-Divino Afflatu missal shows some interesting things, most of which have been observed previously (e.g. here). First of all, the three saints immediately after Christmas, even if they fall on a Sunday, were always celebrated on their proper days. The observance of the Sunday within the octave in these cases was moved to the 30th of December, immediately after the feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury. However, if Sunday fell on the 29th of December, the day of the feast of St. Thomas, a much later addition to the octave (13th cent.), the Sunday was celebrated on that day, and St. Thomas was forced to move to the 30th. This represented a departure from the normal rankings of feasts, as St. Thomas was celebrated as duplex feast, while the Sunday was semiduplex, as almost all Sundays were.

Another strange thing happened if Christmas fell on a Monday. In this case, and this is the only case in which this can occur after St. Thomas of Canterbury was added to the octave, the “Missa de Octava” is celebrated on Saturday, Dec. 30. This Mass is still used on all the days of the Christmas octave that do not have a saint’s feast assigned to them. It is essentially the third Mass of Christmas day, with the epistle and gospel from the Mass of dawn. In the 1960 rubrics, this Mass can theoretically be celebrated on Dec. 29-31, since the saints’ feasts on those days were reduced to commemorations.

In the pre-Divino Afflatu rubrics, there was only one case in which this Mass could ever be celebrated during the octave of Christmas: if the day after St. Thomas (Dec. 29) should fall on a Saturday. Then on Sunday, Dec. 31, St. Sylvester (a feast going back to the fourth century) was celebrated, and the Sunday was only commemorated. This is very curious, since in other such cases, when an important Sunday was impeded, it was quite natural to anticipate its Mass and office on the previous Saturday. This is what used to happen if, for example, a Sunday after Epiphany (always the second) were “swallowed up” by Septuagesima because of a very early Easter. There is clearly something unusual about the Sunday within the octave of Christmas, the Mass “Dum medium silentium,” which was also used for the Vigil of Epiphany (also suppressed in the rubrical reforms of 1960).

This might seem to be irrelevant information, but the apparent liturgical chaos that takes place between Christmas and Epiphany seems to overlap with some of the 11 days which my lunar calendar schema cannot deal with. I will just say now that I have no idea what to do with it, except to note two things: first, that the first Sunday after it (wherever “it” might be) corresponds to the first day of Tevet, the first winter month. The second thing to note is that Epiphany in the West was not uniformly observed. In the Eastern traditions it was celebrated as the birthday of Christ, before the feast on Dec. 25 began to be observed, but this was a feast which migrated from the West. In the Milanese tradition, it even seems to have been a movable feast (to some extent) celebrated before Christmas.1 But it is generally agreed upon that the feast of the Nativity of Christ on Dec. 25 was the original observance in Rome, Epiphany not arriving until later, so the fact that it seems to have no place in the reconstructed lunar calendar is not particularly upsetting, since all of these lunar vestiges (revolving around Easter, remember) would have crystallized fairly early, certainly well before St. Thomas was added to the octave, and likely even before St. Sylvester, and probably before there was an octave (or even a feast?) of Christmas.

In order to help all of this make sense, here is a “complete” lunar calendar, radiating out from Easter Sunday as previously discussed.