When Eight Days Were Accomplished
We tend to associate today with the fact that it is January 1st, the first day of a new year. All our secular thoughts revolve around the New Year’s holiday: last night we celebrated New Year’s Eve with all its accompanying worldly festivities, some of which have an unfortunate tendency to progress beyond the limits of civilized behavior. Now, today, it’s the start of 2023, a new beginning for all of us as we march forward once again with new commitments, new resolutions, and a seemingly unlimited hope for all the happiness this new year will surely bring. Let’s see how that all works out… In the meantime, let’s take a look at this New Year’s Day from a different perspective.
If we look at today’s Gospel, which is the shortest of the entire year, we see that it begins with these words: “When eight days were accomplished.” Today is the eighth day of Christmas, the Octave Day of Christmas. The Jewish religion was filled with such octaves, weeklong celebrations of the greatest of their high holydays. These festivals were so sacred that their joyful celebration could not be contained within a mere 24-hour period, and so was extended to include the whole week that followed. The concept of octaves was adopted by the Catholic Church, and we have many such octaves, including Christmas, that are celebrated for the same reasons that the Jews of old practiced: the weeklong extension of the celebration of a great Holyday.
The liturgy of the Catholic Churches divides its octaves into several classes, arranged according to the importance of the feasts to which they are attached. Without going into the details of these arrangements, we should at least consider the importance of the very existence of these octaves in general. We should cherish these octaves as the continuation of traditions stretching back into the Old Testament when God commanded the Jews to observe this custom. And we should embrace these traditional octaves, cherishing the care with which Holy Mother Church has established these weeklong celebrations, allowing us to observe our greatest feasts with appropriate solemnity and without undue haste.
The Octave of Christmas is no exception to this concept. It is a feast so great that it gives its name to a whole season, called by some Yuletide, by others simply Christmastide. The season begins with the feast itself obviously, an explosion of joy that has been so joyfully anticipated that it cannot wait even for the morning of Christmas Day. Mass is celebrated as early as possible on Christmas Day, at the stroke of Midnight, the only day of the year on which this privilege is granted. The tradition of Midnight Mass is part of the unique magic of Christmas, one we treasure from our childhood memories and a tradition we continue to this day. The rest of Christmas day follows, and then moves into the whole series of feasts we associate with the Christmas Octave—St. Stephen’s Day on the 26th, the feast of St. John the Apostle on the 27th, and then Holy Innocents Day, or Childermas, on the 28th.
So let’s not look at today as just the beginning of a New Year, it also marks the end of the Christmas Octave. This eighth day after the Nativity is the day appointed by Jewish law on which a male newborn is circumcised and given a name. It’s the day on which our Saviour subjected himself to this law of Moses, and shed for the very first time his most precious Blood, one drop of which was sufficient for the redemption of all mankind. It is a very important day on so many accounts, giving us pause in our rejoicing to reflect upon the shedding of that Blood, and the reason why “unto us a Child is born.”
Once today is over though, we will continue our natural prolonging of our Christmas rejoicing for as long as we can, because even an Octave doesn’t seem to be long enough. While the end of the Christmas Octave is today, January 1st, we begin a kind of rerun of Christmas week, celebrating again the three feasts that followed Christmas Day. Because of their close association with our Lord’s blessed Nativity, each is accorded its own simple octave. So tomorrow is the Octave Day of St. Stephen, Tuesday the Octave Day of St. John, and Wednesday the Octave Day of Holy Innocents, a glorious repetition of the first part of Christmas week that leads us to the arrival of the three Wise Men on Epiphany.
This feast of Epiphany falls on January 6th, twelve days after Christmas Day. For this reason it is also known as Twelfth Night, and reminds us of the carol, “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. Eight days weren’t enough, so let’s go for twelve… Even then, on the twelfth day, as we begin our celebration of the Three Kings bringing their gifts to Jesus, the joy of Christmas is not yet over. Another name for Epiphany is “Little Christmas”, and our Yuletide spirit is still far from being extinguished. For another eight days, we continue our celebration with yet another Octave, that of Epiphany. I think we’re beginning to be convinced how reluctant the Church is to turn away from her celebration of the great feast of Our Lord’s birth.
Meanwhile, the Devil, of course, is driven apoplectic with rage at the sight of all this happy rejoicing at Christ’s birth. He is determined to put a stop to it all as best he can. During the Protestant reformation, he succeeded in banning the celebration of Christmas in some of the new Protestant nations, but the innate faith of the people would have none of it, and gradually the tinsel and the lights crept back, commercialized to the extent Satan could manage it, but still unmistakably Christmas. Even the Protestants could not help but be illuminated by the coming of the Light of the World, and stories like Charles Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” enforced the sentiment that there was more to Christmas than the material accumulation of wealth. Thus thwarted in his plan, the Devil tried a different tactic…
And so, during the pontificate of Pope Pius XII, with the help of the freemasons, Satan began his attack on the Catholic liturgy. One of his first moves was to abolish the Christmas Octave along with almost every other octave celebrated by the Catholic Church. Gone were the octaves of St. Stephen, St. John, Holy Innocents and Epiphany, along with those of Ascension, Corpus Christi, Sacred Heart, the Assumption, the Immaculate Conception, St. Joseph, St. John Baptist, Ss. Peter and Paul, All Saints, and more. Only the Easter and Pentecost Octaves were spared the modernist axe. The modernists then went on to abolish the actual feast of the Circumcision altogether, depriving the secular holiday of New Year of any religious significance whatsoever. As Catholics who love the riches of our liturgy we should deplore these so-called reforms: they were made by evil men who were hell-bent on destroying the Catholic Church by corrupting our Divine Worship. The abolition of the Christmas Octave and today’s feast were merely steps along the way to the New Mass and the new modernist Conciliar Church.
Here at St. Margaret Mary’s, you can be assured that we follow none of these modernist reforms. Your Christmas Octave and Feast of the Circumcision are safe, and we proudly celebrate them here. The Guild of St. Peter ad Vincula is dedicated to the observance of the untainted and unreformed liturgy of Tradition, and the Mass we say, the Divine Office we publish online, even the calendar we provide at the back of the church here, are authentic and traditional, something that cannot be said of most of the other churches in the area. To them, any reference in our Gospel today to the “eight days being accomplished” is meaningless, thanks to their acceptance of the ravages of modernism inflicted on the Church’s liturgy. We, at least, have the privilege of getting our New Year off to a good Catholic start, with the culmination of the Octave of Christmas today and our preparation for the next great feast and its octave, Epiphany, this coming Friday.
So while I wish you a very Happy New Year today, I make no apologies for wishing you also a very Merry Christmas. Because it isn’t over yet!