j0ekerr: Gooood Morning GOOOOG!
As some of you may have noticed, (most will not, I mean, who pays attentions to the ramblings of a psychopathic bunny whose first soluton for any given problem is always chainsaw?) I've been rather insistent with the whole date of epiphany, almost obnoxiously so.
Today I will explain why with some detail.
Today is the 5th, known as Night of the Kings or Night of the Magi (or epiphany's eve). It is the day before the last day of christmas and it is also known as the night of the children. Why? Because tonight the 3 wise men, or magi, will deliver toys to all the good chidren. Throughout the day, there will be
parades with fantasy floats in all the major cities, and even small towns, in which the 3 magi will travel in procession, and shower everyone who comes to see with candies thrown with machine gun intensity. There's always someone who gets hit in the eye by a particularly powerfully thrown piece candy and complains about it later. Some of the smaller parades even give out small inexpensive toys. Tomorrow morning, the children will wake up to find their shoes filled with presents, or coal if they've been bad.
We give our presents on the very last day of christmas, not the first. As a child I used to despair about having to wait until the very end to get my presents. But even then, I liked having something to look forward to. As an adult, I like having an important celebration still being left after christmas and new year. Something big and flashy to finish the festivities with. I've always thought that in other countries christmas seemed to dwindle away, and went off, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
It also means we get one more day of national holiday wohoooo!
And, that in the spirit of giving, I will be doing a (very) small giveaway.
Good morning j0ekker! Happy holiday to you! Btw, I wonder how come you celebrate the Epiphany's Eve more than the Epiphany itself. Around my parts we'll celebrate tomorrow the 6th the
, as Epiphany is called in Greek, which in the orthodox church commemorates rather the baptism of Christ in the Jordan river by John Prodromos, and the fact that the Holy Spirit in the form of a white pigeon showed up and the voice of God was heard saying "This is my chosen son"-which is imo way more important than the visit of the magi to a toddler Christ. Apart from the usual church liturgy, the waters are blessed and some people fall in the sea to retrieve a cross a priest throws in-whoever retrieves it will be lucky in the new year. Your holiday is certainly more paradey thus! :-) But that's still far from the whimper you mentioned other countries seem to have-plus, the 6th is a holiday around here too!
At any rate, it was nice reading about the traditions of those days from somewhere else!
P.S.
from wikipedia that also mentions some traditions that are no longer followed(I haven't heard Epiphany carols for some years for example!).