I figured it was the season for some holiday factoids. =)

The Christmas season is about much more than a day: it is about celebrating the miracle and life of Christ. Just as we have the Advent Calendar to count up to Christmas Day, so we also have the Twelve Days, which follow Christmas and lead up to the Epiphany.

Surviving mainly in Europe today, the Epiphany is a long-celebrated day that remembers the arrival of the Magi. Literally “Manifestation,” the Epiphany is also the day taken to commemorate the second birth or baptism of Christ and the importance of God being made man through that act.

A couple years ago, I made up what I called Epiphany Boxes for my family, though more accurately they were 12 Days of Christmas boxes. I made gifts for each day, enough for the whole family, appealing to Christmas traditions. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll share some of them on Wednesdays. =)

I’ll start today with The Christmas Star, for which I gave a star ornament for the tree.

The Christmas Star is one of the most questioned and most miraculous signs that accompanied the arrival of the Lord. It is this star that led the Magi to Bethlehem, this star that shone with a wondrous light to announce Him to the world. What was it? That is something that scholars and astronomers have been trying to discover for millennia.

Some say it is a miracle akin to the Pillar of Fire that God used to lead Israel out of Egypt. Others hold that it was a cosmic event such as a comet or super-nova. Still others hold it was an actual star and focus on the claim that it came to a halt over Bethlehem, which indicates it must be either the sun or Venus, the two “wandering stars” that halt in their paths.

Interestingly, that’s actually one of the reasons we celebrate Christmas on 25 December. The sun does “halt” on its north-south progression for three days, twice a year, on the solstices. During the time of Christ’s birth, the winter solstice was 25 December.

Today, we tend to look on the arrival of a star to herald Christ as either miraculous or just plain crazy. But it’s interesting to note that at the time of Christ, every great man was thought to be accompanied by a star when he was born. Similar cosmic events have been recorded for Alexander the Great, Abraham, and Saint Augustine. So for His followers, it wasn’t odd that a star appeared for him—it would have been odd had one not.

(If anyone wanted a doc with the script I used for the gifts and full descriptions of the presents to use as ideas for your own boxes, I’d be happy to email it to you!)

I thought for today’s Remember When I’d dive into the political of our Biblical days. When rereading Stray Drop, I noted a few places where I mentioned Israel’s lack of a king at that time. Since I was in “question everything” mode, I figured I’d better look that up–there was, after all, that Herod dude.

I found that technically speaking, I was right. Though Herod the Great (who ruled when Christ was born) had been given the title of King over all of Israel by Caesar, things changed with his death. And it was his own fault, too! He couldn’t decide which of his sons he wanted to take his place, so he divided the kingdom into three parts, called the eldest king, and gave the others lesser titles. This all had to be approved by Caesar, though, and he said, “Er, no. You can divide the kingdom, but no on gets to be king.” So they all got “arch” designations–tetrarch was Herod Antipas’s title. By the time Jesus is tried and crucified, Israel was down to two of Herod the Great’s sons, the other having been declared mentally unstable.

So the Herod we hear about during Jesus’ trial was the ruler of Galilee, the province Jesus was from, though not the one he had been in when he committed the “crimes” he was tried for. For that, he was in the realm of Pilate, who had been appointed as prefect of Judea when the third son went cuckoo-bananas. In Stray Drop I refer to Pilate as the governor, as the Gospels do, mainly to avoid confusion–one of my main characters is a military prefect over the Tenth Legion, and I didn’t want to use “prefect” for two very different characters and positions.

I enjoyed pointing out the irony of the sign Pilate hangs above Jesus: This is Jesus, King of the Jews. It had been a long time since Israel had had a king from their own ranks, one appointed by the prophet of God instead of Rome. Romans would have seen the claim as a joke, something mocking. Israelites would have seen it as a slap in the face.

We have the advantage of recognizing the truth in the mockery. That was Jesus–King of Us All.