Today, in many Catholic countries, January 6, the feast of the Epiphany is celebrated and it is considered the 12th day of Christmas, the end of the Christmas season. In the US, we always celebrate Epiphany on a Sunday, so it is a date that changes each year. This year, our Christmas season ends with the Baptism of the Lord on January 9. We love receiving and giving gifts on the Christmas season. It is so much identified with this time of the year. According to the first letter of John, Jesus allows us to achieve victory over the things of this world, Jesus is the very best gift we can receive, the gift that brings us eternal life. It is a good message for us to meditate on during this Christmas season. I was reading an article on the internet last week about how the members of the Generate X who were born in the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s have really started to contemplate their mortality this year since many stars and celebrities that they grew up with since as Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in Star Wars and Florence Henderson as the mother of the Brady Bunch have passed away this year. We know that life is not always a fairy tale, that we have twist and turns and ups and downs on our journey, that death and change are the one things that are constants in life. Yet we have our faith in Christ and the salvation we achieve in him, in the eternal life we receive once our earthly life comes to an end. In Advent, in that time of preparation and waiting, we placed our hope in the coming of Jesus in the nativity in Bethlehem, in his second coming, and in the enteral life we will receive at the end of our days here on earth. We received Christ born in that humble manger on Christmas day. We wait for his second coming. We wait for our eternal life in Christ. We wait in hope and trust.
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