Another of Nick Nicholas’s Facebook reports from Greece (cf. A Melancholy Visit) points out (typos silently corrected):
Greece is a less secular country than those of the Anglosphere, so today is Epiphany and tomorrow is St John’s Day, not merely the sixth and the seventh of January. Feast days still mark the calendar here, like they used to in England. Candlemas and Michaelmas weren’t just made up to make university calendars sound like something out of Harry Potter, they correspond to της Υπαπαντής και του Άη Μιχάλη.
I had heard of Candlemas but could never remember what it was and why it was called that; per OED (entry published 1888, not fully revised) it’s “The feast of the purification of the Virgin Mary (or presentation of Christ in the Temple) celebrated with a great display of candles,” it’s celebrated on February 2nd, and the word goes back to Old English (“Her on þissum geare Swegen geendode his dagas to candel mæssan iii nonas Febr,” Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). But I especially wondered about the Greek name, Υπαπαντή; Wiktionary says:
Derived from Ancient Greek ὑπαπάντησις (hupapántēsis) “encounter”, variant of ὑπάντησις (hupántēsis), from the verb ἀπαντάω (apantáō), ἀντάω (antáō) “to meet”.
And this variant is in LSJ as ὑπαπάντ-ησις , εως, ἡ ; its only occurrence as listed there is in an inscription from ii/i B.C. But what an odd word! I understand haplo(lo)gy, but why add in a syllable? What happened to efficiency in communication?
Just been celebrating Epiphany today with the family in Spain. Big thing here (Valencia):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany_(holiday)#Spain
I got the king in the cake.
Michelmas is also a typo
I know Candlemas because it’s one of the traditional Scottish quarterdays (halfway between Samhain and Beltane, or alternatively between Martinmas and Whitsun).
Glasgow still officially had Martinmas and Candlemas terms when I was there, although no one called them that in conversation. Candlemas is quite a Scottish thing, although he says ‘England’.
Quite a lot of people here do seem to vaguely know of Epiphany as the right date for taking down your Christmas tree, although with a bit of confusion about whether it’s unlucky to do it before or after.
…but that’s Febr 7th, not 2nd…?
In March, July, October, May
The Ides are on the fifteenth day,
The Nones, the seventh; all else besides
Have two days less for Nones and Ides.
AD III Non Feb is what the Youth of Today call the “Third of February.” (The 2nd is AD IV Non Feb.) I blame texting.
Wikipedia says that the nones comes 4 days after the kalends except in March, May, July and October, although I expect you know more about it than it does. (If you count the nones as its own day 1 then I still make it the 3rd, though…)
Υπαπαντή in the Feb. 2 sense seems to be Englished these days (in ecclesiastical circles where it’s relevant) just as “Meeting.” It’s the feast of the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple (by Simeon and Anna, when the Lord was 40 days old, counted inclusively). Wikipedia suggests “Feast of the Holy Encounter,” but I can’t say I’ve encountered (as it were) that one myself in the wild. In modern standard Macedonian (one claimant to be the true successor of OCS), it’s the Сретение Господово, and the names in most other modern Slavic tongues are similar. I don’t know if Сретение for “meeting” is a normal non-churchy word in e.g. Russian or not.
Michaelmas never became a big deal in most of the U.S., presumably because too high a percentage of the early settlers were non-conforming Dissenters who were suspicious of the remaining post-Reformation traces of saints and angels found in British culture. The U.S. Supreme Court has “October Term” each year, which is fairly transparently a renaming of Michaelmas Term. The Byzantine calendar commemorates Michael “and the Other Bodiless Powers” on Nov. 8 (either Julian or Gregorian, depending on where you are), and I’m not sure that observance ever had quite the same turn-of-the-seasons cultural importance as Michaelmas in more Western places.
We took our tree down this afternoon.
In the U.S. outside of limited ecclesiastical circles, Candlemas is of course Groundhog Day*. In Welsh it has the nicely religious name of Gŵyl Fair y Canhwyllau, but was traditionally accompanied by folkloric customs that some wikipedia contributors seem confident were Authentic Pagan Survivals. In the U.S., at least, the sort of people who say Samhain instead of Halloween would say Imbolc for Candlemas, although I guess technically that’s supposed to be a day earlier.
*Imported to Pennsylvania from Germany, with a North American groundhog substituting for an Old Country badger. One older Pennsylvania Dutch source quoted by wikipedia suggests that those particular Teutonic Protestants had retained “Lichtmess Marye” as the old ecclesiastical name for the day on which the groundhog did its thing.
If you count the nones as its own day
You do indeed. That was the principle throughout (and why Christ is said to have risen on the third day, despite this actually being the Sunday after the Friday when he died, i.e. the second day in Modernspeak.)
The Nones are so called on account of being the ninth day (by this way of reckoning) before the Ides.
Michelmas is also a typo
Fixed, thanks.
We took the lights and decorations off our tree this afternoon, but won’t take the tree itself away until my wife feels like driving to the house where you can feed Xmas trees to the goats.
And indeed as I adverted to above that mode of “inclusive” counting is why Candlemas is usually called the fortieth day after Christmas even though Feb. 2 is 39 days after Dec. 25 in Modernspeak. (The 40 is the sum of the 7 in Lev. 12:2 and the 33 in Lev. 12:4; the 8th day referenced in 12:3 for the timing of t he circumcision is thus on that approach Jan. 1 for a boy born on Dec. 25.)
Yesterday was, of course, St. Jordan’s day. Epiphany, as David Eddyshaw said. Big thing here also.
“I got the king in the cake.” congrats 🙂
Here they throw a cross in a body of water and people compete to take it out first. There have been two documented accidents of mass deaths in the last thirty years with mass deaths of spectators, of collapsed bridges.
Imbolc is by far the least known of the Celtic quarterdays in Ireland because it had been repurposed as Saint Brigid’s Day (which also eclipses Candlemas). The other three quarterdays give their names to the months they open, but the Irish for February has been Romanised to Feabhra.
Sorry, I meant to delete that — it was too morbid.
Actually, I found it very interesting and am glad you mentioned it.
@V: In Greece, at least, the French king-in-the-cake observance is translated to Jan. 1 where some lucky person will find a coin or trinket in his or her slice of Vasilopita / Βασιλόπιτα. The internet tells me that Bulgarians do something similar on Jan 1 or possibly Dec 31 with баница, without giving St. Basil any of the credit, but I do not completely trust the internet on these matters.
The competing-to-get-the-cross-out-of-the-water thing is a big annual thing in one part of Florida, where there has long been a substantial Greek-American community and where the water is still pretty warm in January. I recently saw one of those schlocky-but-edifying social media posts claiming that one of the teenage boys who successfully retrieved the cross had grown up to be a distinguished archbishop, so so there. And indeed, the wikibio of the current senior Greek hierarch in the British Isles appears to confirm that story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikitas_Loulias#1974_Epiphany_celebration
At my parish in Manhattan, we toss a cross into one of the ponds in Central Park (sometimes breaking the ice as necessary to give it a place to go), but it is attached to a string which can then be used to reel it in, and the parish children are not encouraged to go in after it. (This often happens on the Sunday after Jan. 6, since not enough of the parish is allowed to skip work/school by Caesar on the 6th itself when it falls during the week.)
It’s not a random extra syllable, it’s the prefix ἀπο-. The simple verb ἀντάω doesn’t occur in Attic prose, per LSJ; ἀπαντάω is very common; ὑπαντάω is less so, but seems to have a similar meaning; and at some point someone lego’ed (see what I did there?) the latter two together into ὑπαπαντάω. What semantics the prefixes add only der griechische Geist knows.
Ah, of course — thanks for that!
J.W. Brewer : yeah, Jan 6th, stupid kids. I’m pretty sure it’s just a coincidence, though.
Also in Austria Feb 2 (“Maria Lichtmess”) is traditionally the day when observant Christians should take down their trees. Judging by the number of trees I already see piling up on our square’s collection site most Viennese are not particularly observant.
you can feed Xmas trees to the goats.
That’s a nice touch. Here they all just get thrown in the Hundertwasser designed incineration plant to make steam to heat apartment buildings.
the post-katrina new orleans diaspora in my circles here in nyc did king cake at mardi gras time in years where they couldn’t get home, if i remember right – but as i’m thinking about it more, i’m suspecting i have it wrong, and it was actually at Epiphany, maybe announced as “kings day”.
i think the most visible Epiphany in nyc may be the puertorican instantiation, Three Kings Day. i live in the wrong neighborhood now for it to really appear, but when i was uptown the processional spectacles were always fantastic.
Candlemas does appear in my part of town, though! but in a mostly de-christianized form honoring yemaya/yemoja/iemanjá/la sirène/etc directly rather than through one or another camino of mary, though the marian imagery remains pretty central, as i understand it.
@Vanya: I looked at a picture of the Spittelau Incineration Plant, and I realized that had completely confused it with another, probably much older building in Vienna.
I would have thought that a big meal of conifer needles is not good for the digestion of even a goat.
In Ireland, Epiphany being the end of Christmastime is Nollaig na mBan, women’s Christmas.* There is no king cake. Our surprise cake is Halloween barmbrack, hiding a variety of auspices for the finders. In the version I grew up with in Cork there were five—ring, stick, bean, pea, and rag, representing for the following year respectively wedding, beating, riches, poverty, and destitution—but details vary.
*Similarly, the day after Patrick’s Day used to be Sheelagh’s Day, but this only survives in Newfoundland.
Lampe’s A Patristic Greek Lexicon lists an occurrence in the Vita Theodosii by Cyrillus Scythopolitanus (6th century).
Lampe has a lot of lemmata not listed in LSJ (they are marked). It seems Liddell and Scott (and their German source, Passow) were not much interested in reading the theological literature of late antiquity. The recent Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek has some some of these lemmata, but by far not all. It seems there is no such thing as a “complete” dictionary of Ancient Greek.
@rozele: in New Orleans they sometimes speak of an entire Mardi Gras “season,” which commences on Jan. 6 and ends on Shrove Tuesday (i.e. Mardi Gras proper), with king-cake eating and other such festive customs apparently appropriate for any point during that season. Presumably there’s a combination of customs that were originally Epiphany-specific and customs that were originally Shrovetide-specific. Here’s an “explainer” from the website-corpse of the Times-Picayune as to why the mysteries of lunisolar calendars have made this year’s season shorter than it was in 2025: https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/mardi_gras/mardi-gras-date-lunar-cycle/article_87481c2b-2ed1-4d84-a50e-b49f899e9219.html
On Western calendars, the day after Candlemas was traditionally St. Blaise’s Day, and I have myself once (many decades ago) witnessed the traditional church custom for that day of blessing the throats of the faithful with candles that had themselves been blessed the day before. But it was only yesterday that I learned that that day is marked with a special and high-profile celebration every year in Dubrovnik/Ragusa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festivity_of_Saint_Blaise,_the_patron_of_Dubrovnik
And I didn’t find that by random wikipedia-browsing, but because I looked into it after getting a promotional email from a Croatian-diaspora restaurant near me inviting me to make a reservation for a lavish four-course prix-fixe dinner they are holding on Feb. 3 for the Festa Svetog Vlaha. The all-in cost includes your wine and beer and live entertainment (“with Srdjan and Vukan”), and there will be a raffle benefiting charity to “honor[] the true spirit of Saint Blaise.”
Three Kings Day
That’s what it’s called in Germany (Dreikönigstag / Heilige Drei Könige). It’s one of the customary days to throw out the Christmas tree. In Catholic areas, children dressed up as the three wise kings will walk around and collect money for a church-sponsored cause, and write C*M*B on houses that donate, which is supposed to mean either Christus mansionem benedicat or Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar – one of them is supposed to be the correct explanation; I think it’s the first, but I am too lazy to look it up.
Sretenie
The name of the holiday is Сретение Господне Sretenie Gospodne “Meeting of the Lord” in Russian, but that’s Russian Church Slavic. The usual word for “meeting / encounter” is the etymologically related встреча vstrecha.
Hans wrote:
“ In Catholic areas, children dressed up as the three wise kings will walk around and collect money for a church-sponsored cause, and write C*M*B on houses that donate, which is supposed to mean either Christus mansionem benedicat or Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar – one of them is supposed to be the correct explanation; I think it’s the first,”
This custom of writing “C M B” over doorways has spread to Catholics in the U.S. through the descendants of German Catholics and other Central European immigrants ( I think the Poles might do the same thing.) It’s not done much in California because we didn’t receive as many Germans or Poles but it gets mentioned more and more in Catholic media each year and I bet its fairly common in areas like the Upper Midwest which received a lot of German immigrants.
One German custom that really did spread wide among Catholic parishes in the U.S. ( besides the Christmas tree) is the Advent Wreath, to the point of there now being official blessings and prayers for it and many parishes now having a parish wreath which gets lit with accompanying prayers before mass on Sundays of Advent.
The chalking-Magi-initials-on-the-door thing is said by wikipedia (FWIW) to have survived in Poland through the Communist era as a comparatively “safe” gesture of non-acquiescence with the regime’s anti-religious policies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalking_the_door
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it “in the wild” in the U.S., although I vaguely recall seeing a bulletin some years ago from some very high-church Manhattan Episcopal parish encouraging people to do it with their apartment doors. I remember seeing an instance or two a few years ago in Germany, which was interesting because it was I think October – as if no one had washed it off in the nine months since Epiphany and there hadn’t been a rainstorm severe enough to do so.
J. W. Brewer said:
“ Υπαπαντή in the Feb. 2 sense seems to be Englished these days (in ecclesiastical circles where it’s relevant) just as “Meeting.” It’s the feast of the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple (by Simeon and Anna, when the Lord was 40 days old, counted inclusively).”
Sometimes when a holy day is shared between the Greek East and the Latin West there is a difference in focus and emphasis. While in the Greek East the feast is about the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple by Saints Simeon and Anna, in the Latin West the focus is on the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple and the Purification of Our Lady in fulfillment of the Law of Moses. Simeon and Anna are not forgotten as they appear in the readings from the Gospel of Luke for that day.
A similar thing happens with Epiphany. In the Greek East its about the revelation of Christ at His baptism in the Jordan and in the Latin West its about the Visit of the Wise Men to Christ in Bethlehem. I think that at the very beginning they ( and the Nativity and I think the miracle at Cana, at least in the West) were commemorated on the same day and then there was a split. The Latin West has a separate day to commemorate the Baptism in the Jordan (this coming Sunday for us Catholics.)
I remember seeing an instance or two a few years ago in Germany, which was interesting because it was I think October – as if no one had washed it off in the nine months since Epiphany and there hadn’t been a rainstorm severe enough to do so.
It’s simply not done to wash it off, although it’s fine if it gets removed by rain and sun bleaching. So if it’s in an area protected by, say, an awning, it can stay on for years.
In our area, the church has replaced chalk by little stickers with CMB and the current year, so you’ll find sticker collections besides the house door at many places.
While the children walking around collect for the Catholic church, most people donate to get the CMB independent of whether they are Catholic or Christian or religious at all; it’s just customary and setting oneself apart from the neighbors is a very un-German thing.
I just saw a press release (dated yesterday) advising me that ‘Six-time GRAMMY Award winner and 2022 Kennedy Center Honoree Amy Grant returns today with her new single, “The 6th of January (Yasgur’s Farm).”’ The song supposedly “explores themes of healing, unity, and human and spiritual connection, asking how we sit with the unrest of the world without rushing to conclusions about how to fix it.” It does not seem to acknowledge or do anything with the fact that the titular date is the feast of the Epiphany. But although Ms. Grant first came to prominence as a performer of explicitly Christian music before crossing over to a more mainstream style, she was raised in the sort of Protestant milieu (Stone-Campbell restorationist) that may have had little use for or familiarity with the traditional calendar. (I see from its website that her childhood church did observe Advent this past year, but they well may not have done so back in the Seventies, even if they were loose enough not to affirmatively condemn Christmas trees as a pagan-or-Popish practice.)
To her credit, Ms. Grant does manage to rhyme “sixth of January” with “scattered all to Hell and Harper’s Ferry,” which seems like an allusion to some traditional Appalachian proverb but appears to be an original combination of her own.
@J.W. Brewer:
‘
Surely it still is St. Blaise’s Day? Traditionally, at least in Milan, the day to eat your last panettone or piece thereof. Though you have to keep it for that purpose yourself, because stores get rid of their stock way earlier nowadays. Good for your throat and nose, of course.
@GP: Glad to hear it re Milan. The Vatican bureaucratic authorities have changed their calendar so much in the last 50-60 years I am never sure what is still the same and what isn’t, so perhaps I am excessively prone to hedge or talk in terms of past practice rather than invest the time to specifically look things up when it comes to current practice in those circles. Dubrovnik could have held on to a traditional date for folkloric/tourist-trade reasons amidst that sort of random change, of course.
“ Surely it still is St. Blaise’s Day? ”
It is still St.Blais’s Day. He’s the patron saint of throat ailments and Catholic churches including mine still do the blessing of throats on that day. It’s one of those customs that never died out and remains popular in many places today.