Epiphany, a special day I always remember
- col-leslie-pearce-keating
- January 16, 2024
- 687
I finally took down the 8-foot tree on Jan. 5. The huge Rubbermaid boxes were sitting on the floor of the family room, belching forth tissue-wrapped ornaments, waiting to be hoisted to the basement storage. How will I get those lids on? I wondered. How will I carry those boxes down the stairs? How can an artificial tree make such an incredible mess?
Every year I want to wait longer and longer to dismantle the décor from the holidays. I don’t have kids to get back to college anymore, but I do have to get myself back to the classroom. Each year I feel so lucky I experienced another Christmas. How many more Christmases will I have? I often wonder.
I love those days so much: the music, the remembrance of those times I marched at St. Matthias Church with the other little girls as angels at midnight mass, all the years I sang with choir or did solos, the smells of cookies baking in the oven, the sound of the laughter of my children when they were small, the rustle of packages being opened and the sighs of delight, and the sight of my sleeping kids on the couches or in their bed on their brief but joyful visits now as adults.
There are certain days from the season that stand out in my memory: Dec. 6 as St. Nicholas Day when we left out our stockings for St. Nick to fill when I was young. One year I got a cash register. I played “shopping” for months after receiving that gift from St. Nick. And no, it did not fit in my stocking. One year I got a blackboard that years later I conjugated verbs on for high school French. There were always such fond memories of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, with the lovely services, the trees, the poinsettias, the candles, the big tree bedecked with Mom’s ornaments. And then there was Epiphany.
My mother, and the church for that matter, always put special emphasis on Epiphany as a highlight of the season. After all, the wise men’s arrival was the final celebration of the holiday. If you count days like most folks do, Christmas Day is just the first day of the 12 days of Christmas, with Epiphany being the 12th. Many religions celebrate gift giving on that day, not on the Christmas holiday.
Although we celebrate the birth of Jesus on Dec. 25, of all the days in my family’s calendar, the sixth of January was the most sacred remembrance, for that was the day when my mom and dad’s first son passed away. In other words, as one precious child was being celebrated by kings, another little boy took his final breath.
Richard would be 70 now if he had lived, but he didn’t quite make it to his first birthday in May 1953. He was a sad legend of sorts in my house. There were tiny, dried roses from his funeral in a vase, along with my sister Carol’s six years later. So even as a child, I knew they had lived not so long ago. Next to the flowers sat the only real photo we had of my brother beside his birth picture. He was perched on my mother’s lap on the couch with my sister and my cousin, both toddlers, beside him in Aunt Toni’s and Grandma’s lap. That photo was from his first and only Christmas with a tinsel-laden tree in the background. Richard was a cherub of a child with tuffs of baby blonde hair and big blue eyes, an honest-to-goodness Gerber baby.
On Jan. 6 when I came home from school each year, Mom was taking down the tree, her cheeks red from crying, though she mostly kept that sadness to herself. When I had difficult pregnancies and births years later, Mom stayed with me, knowing all too well how precious, how wanted those sweet babies were.
And so next week when I go to Mom’s room in the Youngstown-Boardman nursing home to dismantle her holiday decorations, I also will stop at my brother and sister’s grave, as Mom once asked me. “Never forget your brother and sister?” she beseeched as she grew older. “Leave a small tree on their graves.” And so I will take them a small tree. I will take one for my dad too — and my grandparents and Uncle Don.
Because it’s what we do in my family besides revel in the joy at Christmastime. We remember those we’ve lost, those we can never forget.
Especially my brother Richard.