Well for our first meeting of 2010 we thought a little about the "real meaning of Christmas". A much used phrase, but what do we mean by it? What would Christmas look like if we stripped away all the cultural baggage that has been attached to it?
Well, not surprisingly, we didn't really come up with a definitive answer to this question, but on the way we did think about how the season of Christmas developed within the church and how it related to other existing pagan festivals. We also looked at Epiphany and found that this became part of the church calendar before Christmas. We also considered the church calendar in general and the two cycles of Christmas (based around a fixed date) and Easter (based around a moveable Sunday). This is why we get two variable periods of "ordinary time" between the two different cycles. One after Candlemas on 2nd Feb until lent starts, and one from the end of pentecost until advent.
