I would like to extend a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from my family to yours. I hope that this Christmas season has been a joyful one. I also pray that your New Year is filled with many blessings. It’s always important to remember the Incarnation and Birth of Jesus Christ, however, the Christmas Season really helps us focus on this supernatural event that is a cornerstone of our Christian faith.

This Christmas Season was filled with many blessings for my family. I was able to take 10 days off from my work at the University of Mary and spent quality time with my wife and sons. We spent our first Christmas in North Dakota with family from town and family from Wisconsin. It would have been nice to get out in the snow, but we were stuck inside because of the subzero temperatures that spread throughout the region. We are experiencing our first true Upper Midwest Winter with the very cold temps.

Even though yesterday was technically Epiphany, on Sunday, we as a family blessed our new home for the first time with the Epiphany House Blessing. My wife held our youngest and our oldest stood beside me as I led our family in this blessing. We said the prayers together; my wife marked the door frames with the inscription (see below) and then went to each door blessing it with our small bottle of Epiphany Water (what was left of it).

If you have never done this short ceremony with your family, I would highly encourage you to do it, most especially if you have children in your home. In order to do the Epiphany House Blessing, you will need three things:

1. Epiphany Water (regular holy water will work)
2. Chalk (Blessed chalk by a priest is great, however, it’s optional).
3. The ceremony itself (This is the one we did – Family in Feast and Feria). You can also find another article on the blessing at Aleteia.

When the ceremony is complete, on the door frames the current year should flank the letters “C”, “M”, and “B” with crosses in between. The final inscription will read like this: 20+C+M+B+22. The letters not only represent the names of the Magi – Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar but the Latin phrase, Christus Mansionem Benedicat, which means Christ bless this house. 

To learn more about the Epiphany and the arrival of the Wise Men, I would encourage you to read this article I wrote four years ago – The Magi have Arrived.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Epiphany!

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