Dark Friday (Black Friday)

Friday is dark enough just having been named after a demon. English pagan goddess “Frige” is the source of “Fri-day” and the matching Roman demon is Venus, hence “viernes” is the Spanish name for the same day. Having all the fake deals hype on black friday to launch the sales frenzy as people started to check names off their gift lists made yesterday a bit darker for me.

The Roman church needed a big holy day to associate with the importance level of winter solstice and chose a mass dedicated to the birth of Messiah. Christ mass. 12 days of the solstice/Christ mass feast and then they added “Epiphany.” “Light,” as in – Light has shone on the Gentiles by reaching the magi. Debatably, Jesus was not born at this time of the year, but at least they got Epiphany correct as a contrast, by celebrating the two events separately.

January 6 is Epiphany – the day the Roman church made a mass to celebrate the eventual arrival of the magi. The Scripture text describing their arrival made it clear that they found Jesus, Mary & Joseph living in a house by the time they came. Herod made his decision about what age male children to massacre based on the timing that the magi had first seen his star. Maybe as much as 2 years since Jesus’ birth, Herod thought.

So – while being annoyed by the mamonism yesterday, the thought came to me that we should celebrate at Ephiphany mass instead of Christ mass. Everything will be marked down to the regular price the day after the Christ mass (even better than yesterday!), so we could either save money or give twice as much stuff away for the same price.

People will ask what we are doing, and we can use the opportunity to point out to them that we took the magi out of the manger scene for accuracy, and wanted to celebrate with the wizards this year instead of the shepherds.

Lance Wallnau just told me that I am part of “the Resistance,” and it got me in a mood! Ha.