Author: Leigh Hatts

Leigh Hatts is the author of 'Keeping Advent and Christmas' and 'Keeping Lent and Easter' (DLT).
Updates

Advent antiphons

Advent turns on the 17 December as the O Antiphons are heard daily at Mass and Evening Prayer. They are familiar to many as we hear five of them in the Advent hymn O Come, O come, Emmanuel. We are looking at last towards the birth of Christ. By tradition it is now that Mary […]

Leigh Hatts 
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St Lucy’s light

St Lucy’s Day, Monday 13 December, provides another suggestion of the coming light of Christ. It is an important stepping stone in Advent for those in Scandinavia, Sicily and Venice. In Swedish homes and churches it is the tradition for girls to dress as Lucy and wear a crown of candles to recall the manner […]

Leigh Hatts 
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Loreto’s Holy House

The Translation of the Holy House of Loreto on 10 December marks the arrival on this day in Italy of the front section of the house where Mary lived in Nazareth. It took several years to move the house although the iconography suggests that angels carried the little building. This was based on a misunderstanding. […]

Leigh Hatts 
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St Nicholas arrives

‘St Nicholas’ will arrive at Canterbury Cathedral on Sunday, the eve of St Nicholas Day. The St Nicholas Family Service is at 5.30pm when there will be a chance to find out more about the original Father Christmas before St Nic appears. Music is being provided by children’s choirs and bands and the Canterbury Cathedral […]

Leigh Hatts 
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St Andrew beyond Scotland

The last day of November is special in Scotland because it is St Andrew’s Day. But St Andrew, brother of St Peter, is also patron of Greece, Poland, Romania and Russia. Andrew was martyred today in Greece by being crucified upside down on an X shaped cross which is recalled by the St Andrew cross. […]

Leigh Hatts 
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Advent is ‘Slow Christmas’

The pandemic has made a lot of people lose a sense of time and season. The virus has also caused a huge loss of income for shops resulting in the earliest ever display of Christmas decorations in shopping malls and an unseasonal appearance of Father Christmas. If you celebrate early what happens when the real […]

Leigh Hatts 
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Tenebrae on Wednesday

The ancient Holy Week service of Tenebrae is now often held on Wednesday and this year there are opportunities to be present online. ‘This arduous service has mystical beauty,’ observed art historian Brian Sewell who described it as ‘the most disturbing and convincing service’, which was also ‘poetic, theatrical and terrible’. The responses in this […]

Leigh Hatts 
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Holy Week begins tonight

‘Holy Week … is the peculiar privilege of Christians and should be their delight, their share in the sacred act of theatre, their most important week of all the year,’ wrote Observer journalist Patrick O’Donovan. Holy Week, which begins tonight with Christ arriving at Bethany, enables us to live with Christ his final week on […]

Leigh Hatts 
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Nine months to Christmas

Today Thursday 25 March is a bright pause in Lent to look ahead nine months to Christmas. If Christmas is on 25 December so 25 March must be the Annunciation. On this day we recall the Virgin Mary being visited in her Nazareth home by an angel and informed that she would give birth to […]

Leigh Hatts 
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