Why do you all think that Christmas is such a big deal? We can imagine this question being posed by someone who doesn’t know much about Christianity – maybe someone from China, Iran, or North Korea. But that same question would actually be posed to us by the earliest Christians themselves! To them, today’s feast of the Epiphany was much more important.

This ranking of the feast of the Epiphany over Christmas can be seen in the Church’s liturgy. If you follow the Church’s liturgical calendar, you will have noticed that the octave of Christmas is interrupted by the celebration of several feast days (St. Stephen, St. John, the Holy Innocents, and others), while the days between Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord are free of any saints’ days, because the octave of the Epiphany traditionally ranked so high as to exclude any other celebrations. (Such is the case…