Hello and welcome to Catholic Answers Live and Merry Christmas as we are in the Christmas season.

I hope that your Christmas Day was a happy one and had all the blessings that one would want for such a day.

And I hope that your Christmas season is progressing nicely.

We have Father Hugh Barber here with us today for a little bit of talk about the baby Jesus.

Maybe I'll just ask him a little bit about the Christmas season because what is the Christmas season? Is it that eight days after Christmas?

Is it 40 days after Christmas? Is it the entire year until Lent? When does, when is Christmas, Father?

Well, actually, that's a very good question I was thinking as you began. Actually, the Christmas, liturgically, what we call the season of Christmas starts after the eight days following Christmas, Christmas octave.

Okay, so we're in the Christmas octave now.

Right, and that goes until January 1st, which is the octave day of Christmas, the eighth day after Christmas.

And so that day,

the eight days are celebrated by the church as though it were one day. Right. Like Easter,

we have the Easter. Easter, right. Easter octave, right. For big feasts. For big feast days. Well,

it used to be many big feasts now in the current liturgy. There are just two, Christmas and Easter.

Before there was, under Reforms of Pius,

or 1962 reforms, there was at least the octave of Pentecost. Yes. And of course, that kind of exists because the Pentecost octave is sort of concluded by Trinity Sunday. Yes.

So it kind of thematically works. But there were many other octaves because the idea is you protract a feast.

And so the masses in this following days would have been celebrated with an additional

collact or prayer remembering the feast.

And then the octa day would be celebrated just like the main day.

But it seems like in the 20th century, we got the idea that the way to improve Catholicism is make it less Catholic. Yeah, well, you said that in a high, but, but let's just

put us the way, I can just tell you a story. Yeah. That when the, when the new brewery,

what, I knew since 1970, yeah, or 72 or whenever, the, when on the Monday after Pentecost Sunday, when the brewery, the Latin version was put in front of Pope Paul the 6th for him to say his office.

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