Traditions of our Ancestors (I wrote this a while ago and am just finding time to post it).

January tends to be somewhat of a let down and can be a bit depressing. All the excitement is over and it’s just plain cold. Dark and dreary is a perfect description. Well one day I was talking to my dear grandmother and she mentioned that we needed to do something to spice January up, so I said I would make up a holiday that paid homage to our ancestors. Turns out, I didn’t have to make up a holiday because there is one that already exists. Some of you probably already celebrate this holiday that I simply stumbled upon it is called Epiphany day or Three Kings day. Feel free to take this moment to Wikipedia this January holiday because I’m only going to share my version. After much research and picking and choosing of the aspects I liked, we have a holiday (outside of MLK Day) to celebrate in January. This is a holiday that both Ben’s and my ancestors most likely celebrated.

Let me explain our adaptation of our new tradition. On the 6th of every January we will have a special German cake with a bean hidden inside. Whoever gets the bean will be king or queen for a day. This year I got the bean, which was especially lucky because our bathroom flooded, and I had to do very little to help clean up since Ben wanted to make sure I enjoyed my queen day. During the evening we drank homemade apple cider, ate the German bread and read the story of the wise men in Mathew 2. We also wrote down our own gift to Christ for the year to symbolize the gifts the wise men brought to baby Jesus. We put our pieces of paper in a special box to keep until next year when we plan on reading and evaluating our progress. We hope to get gold, frankinsence, and myrrh to add to our box and further help with the symbolism.

We really enjoyed participating in something that our ancestors probably participated in. It was another way for us to carry the Christmas spirit into the new year, plus I now have a perfectly legitimate reason for keeping my Christmas tree up for an extra 6 days.

If you want more information on how different cultures celebrated/ celebrate Epiphany Day, please email me or leave a comment asking for more info. Ben and I chose certain aspects of the holiday that best represented our own ancestors and adapted it to fit our lives, but we left out some traditions that might appeal to others.