The Christmas season is drawing to a close at last. Today is when the Three Wise Men finally reach the manager in countless Catholic Nativity scenes.
When describing it, one of my kids used the term “Three Wise Guys,” and naturally it stuck, because it is both funny and cute.
Of course, like most Americans, I grew up with the secular approach to Christmas, where Christmas Day was the end of the season, rather than its beginning. One of the benefits of following the liturgical calendar is that it deepens the spiritual experience of the holiday and also does a better job of explaining it.
Christmas was not just a singular event, but it unfolded in complex ways with multiple intertwined events. Mashing them into a single day of celebration trivializes that, and sets children up for later disillusionment when they find out that the story they were told wasn’t true.
By contrast, Three Wise Guys rolling up after the fact explains the time after the star rose, and also broaches the topic of The Slaughter of Innocents by Herod, the exile into Egypt, and how these events fulfilled various prophecies.
We are frequently reminded in the Gospels to approach faith like a child, retaining a sense of wonder and the longer seasons of the liturgical calendar facilitate this. Christmas is not a retail shopping event, soon replaced by new merchandise, but something that stays with us after it happens. It isn’t one thing, but many things, and the simplicity of adding the Wise Men is a great example of this. Today I updated the family Nativity and the grandkids joyfully placed the Wise Men in their little playset. This helps them understand why our decorations were up when others were already coming down.
The return to Ordinary Time is underlined by school resuming, and soon Lent will be upon us, with tuna salad and cheese pizza taking over Friday nights. While Protestants may deride these practices as antiquated or superstitious, they help us keep the material world at more of a distance. The many feasts, solemnities and memorials keep God in our hearts whenever we check the calendar.
And The Three Wise Guys remind us to never lose the wonder of a child.
Chateau Lloyd 
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