The Liturgical Year: Living the Story of Jesus at Home

There is a moment that happens in many Christian homes, usually sometime in early December, when a child looks up from whatever they are doing and asks a question that stops you cold.

Why do we do this?

Why do we light these candles? Why do we fast before Easter? Why are we baking saffron buns and talking about a girl who lived sixteen hundred years ago?

If you have ever been asked that question, or if you hope someday to be, then the liturgical year is one of the most powerful gifts the Church has to offer your home.

God Has Always Sanctified Time

Before we talk about Advent wreaths and Easter feasts, we need to go back to something we touched on in the last post in this series.

In Exodus 13, God gives His people instructions that go far beyond a single meal. He is not simply telling Israel to eat unleavened bread and remember Egypt. He is doing something far more profound. He is teaching His people how to inhabit time.

He could have said simply, “Remember that I saved you.” Instead He said, “Every year, on this day, stop what you are doing. Gather your family. Eat this meal. Tell the story.”

This is the difference between two ways of experiencing time that the ancient Greeks understood well. Chronos is ordinary, measurable time, the simple passing of days and weeks and years. Kairos is something altogether different. It is time not measured by its duration but by its meaning. It is time that has been filled with significance, set apart, made holy.

What God gave Israel through the feast days and festivals was not just a religious calendar. He was teaching them to transform chronos into kairos, to move through the year in a way that continuously reminded them who they were, whose they were, and what He had done for them.

And when the long-awaited Messiah finally came, the Church did the same thing.

An Ancient and Beautiful Response

The liturgical year did not emerge from a committee meeting or a theological debate. It emerged from the overwhelming significance of what had actually happened in history.

Christ had died. Christ had risen. And that reality was so earth-shattering, so utterly transformative, that from the very beginning Christians began marking it with deep reverence and structured celebration.

One of the earliest witnesses to this is Polycarp, a disciple of the Apostle John, who lived from approximately 69 to 155 AD. He records making annual pilgrimages to honor the mystery of Christ’s passion and resurrection, not because anyone required it of him, but because the event demanded it.

A few centuries later, a remarkable Spanish woman named Egeria made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and recorded what she found there in extraordinary detail. In her Itinerarium, written around 381 AD, she describes Holy Week services, Easter celebrations, Ascension, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time, all observed with what she calls sensory-rich liturgies: processions, Scripture readings, hymns, fasts, feasts, and communal meals.

Her description of Palm Sunday is worth pausing over:

“After the Eucharist, at which the story of our Lord’s entry into Jerusalem had been read, the people hurried home to eat. At one o’clock, they met the bishop near the top of the Mount of Olives… at five o’clock they processed down the Mount with branches of palm or olive trees, singing psalms including Psalm 118 with all shouting ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ The procession went to the site of our Lord’s tomb, a prayer was held at the site of the cross, and the people were dismissed.”

What strikes me about this account is how familiar it feels. Sixteen centuries later, Christians are still processing with palm branches, still singing Psalm 118, still gathering to hear the story of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The liturgical year is not a modern invention or a denominational preference. It is the Church’s ancient, embodied response to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and it has been shaping Christian homes and communities for over two thousand years.

The Seasons of the Story

Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time are not random traditions layered onto the Christian calendar. They are a gift. They are the way the Church has walked through the story of Jesus together, season after season, century after century.

Through these seasons, we move through the full arc of the Gospel in a single year:

The longing and anticipation of Advent. The joy and wonder of Christmas. The revelation of Christ to the nations at Epiphany. The repentance and self-examination of Lent. The sorrow and silence of Holy Week. The overwhelming joy of Easter. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And then the long green season of Ordinary Time, where the work of growth, discipleship, and faithful living takes place.

Year after year, we walk through the same story. And year after year, we find that we are different people receiving it.

This is one of the profound gifts of the liturgical year. It does not assume that we come to it the same way twice. A child encounters the manger differently at four than at fourteen. A parent hears the words of Holy Week differently after a year of grief. Ordinary Time feels different in a season of flourishing than in a season of waiting. The story remains constant. We are the ones being formed by it.

Bringing the Story Home

Here is what I want you to hear clearly: celebrating the liturgical year at home does not require elaborate programs or perfectly executed traditions.

One of my favorite examples comes from the Feast of St. Lucy, observed on December 13th. Her story is one of extraordinary courage, a young woman who gave her life rather than renounce her faith in Christ. After dinner, we read her story together. Earlier in the day, we bake the traditional Swedish saffron buns that have been associated with her feast for centuries.

The smell of those buns as they come out of the oven. The golden color. The act of making them together. Tasting them as we remember her life. All of it reinforces the memory in a way that words alone never could. And the raisins pressed into the center of the S-shaped buns? They represent her eyes, which were blinded before her martyrdom. It is a detail that no child ever forgets — and that is precisely the point.

This is what the liturgical year does in a home. It makes the faith sensory, embodied, and memorable. Children do not just hear about the courage of the saints. They smell it. They taste it. They carry it.

Maria von Trapp, whose family’s story of faith and beauty has inspired generations, once wrote that visitors to her home would often ask about the celebrations and traditions they encountered there. It gave her a natural opportunity to share about her faith, not through pressure or argument, but through beauty, hospitality, and story.

The liturgical year has always worked this way. It is, among many other things, one of the most natural forms of witness available to a Christian home.

A Word About Ordinary Time

We should say something about the season we find ourselves in right now, because it is easy to overlook.

Ordinary Time, the long green season that follows Pentecost and stretches through late autumn, is not a placeholder between the more dramatic seasons of the year. Its name does not mean unimportant. It comes from the Latin ordinalis, meaning numbered or ordered. These are the counted weeks, the weeks of growth.

If Advent and Lent are seasons of preparation, and Christmas and Easter are seasons of celebration, then Ordinary Time is the season of formation. It is where discipleship actually happens, in the daily rhythms, the ordinary meals, the quiet practices that accumulate over weeks and months into something we could not have planned or manufactured.

Summer Ordinary Time, in particular, carries its own particular grace. The long evenings, the slower pace, the natural rhythms of garden and table, all of it creates conditions that are genuinely hospitable to the kind of formation we have been exploring throughout this series.

This is not a season to wait out until Advent arrives. It is a season to inhabit.

Where to Begin

If the liturgical year is new to your family, you don’t have to try to observe everything at once. Choose one season or one feast day and begin there.

A few simple ways to enter the liturgical year at home:

• Light a candle in the color of the season. Purple for Advent and Lent, white for Christmas and Easter, red for Pentecost, green for Ordinary Time. This single practice connects your home visually to the rhythm of the Church year.

• Read the collect for the day or the feast during dinner or evening prayer. These ancient prayers distill the meaning of each day into a single, beautiful sentence.

• Tell the story of a saint on their feast day. You do not need to cook a special meal or plan an activity. Simply knowing the name and story of the saint the Church is remembering that day is enough to begin.

• Mark the season with something sensory. A particular scent, a special food, a piece of music that belongs to that time of year. These sensory anchors become some of the most durable memories of childhood.

• Add the major feast days to your family calendar at the beginning of each season so they do not catch you by surprise. Or buy my liturgical wall calendar HERE and my liturgical planner HERE.

• Follow along here. One of the simplest things you can do is let me help. Each week I share what is coming up on the liturgical calendar, the season, the feast day, its history and significance, and simple ways to mark it in your home. You do not have to plan ahead or research on your own. Just show up and I will meet you there.

• 
  

And when your children ask — why do we do this? — you will be ready.

Because God has been faithful to us. Because Jesus has redeemed us. And because His story is worth celebrating.

Next in the series: Beauty and Creation — how gardens, candles, music, and the beauty of the seasons help lift our hearts toward God.

My liturgical year calendar

My liturgical year planner