Templar Edification

 

I find that life is better with holidays. Wouldn’t you agree? St Paul wrote to the Christians at Rome that holy days are a matter of adiaphora; that is, of something neither commanded nor forbidden. We can take them or leave them. Yet I find that special seasons and celebrations add a certain spice to life, as well as a yearly pattern of festival and fasting, of darkness and light, which brings a magic and a mysticism into our hearth and our home. Blame my mother. She was the one when I was growing up who cooked and baked and decorated for all the holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Independence Day, the sacred and the secular alike. It made my childhood wondrous; my adulthood too, now that I have children of my own. And it certainly does improve one’s mood to ever have something to which one looks forward. As I’ve aged, my love for the holidays has only deepened. I still prepare for the big festivities a little too early and a little too long, but now I also champion...