During the Church’s Evening Prayer on Epiphany, the liturgy proclaims:

Three mysteries mark this holy day:
Today the star leads the Magi to the infant Christ;
Today water is changed into wine for the wedding feast;
Today Christ wills to be baptized by John in the river Jordan to bring us salvation.

Usually, we stop with the Magi. The crèche is complete: Mary and Joseph, ox and ass, shepherds with their flocks, magi with their gifts. While everyone might leave the stable—the Holy Family to Egypt, the shepherds telling glad tidings to the villagers, the Magi choosing another route home—the work of God continues on.

This year, just because of the way the Christmas feasts fell, we do get to celebrate the whole of the Epiphany mystery. Last Sunday we heard about the Magi. Today, the baptism. And next week, while we’ve entered into the Church’s Ordinary Time, the gospel will tell of that first miracle at the wedding in Cana.

All this tells us that Christmas is meant to spill over into the rest of our lives. What we learned in these days—celebrations with family and friends (maybe even a few fights and quarrels), moments of prayer and song, memories of those “happy golden days of yore,” the words we spoke in our Advent confessions, the busyness and the rest of the many more than 12 days of Christmas—let it all shape us in our following of Christ.