Epiphany, 6 January

Epiphany falls on the sixth of January in the Western calendar this rule records, twelve days after Christmas, though this rule also notes that some provinces transfer the observance to the nearest Sunday between the second and eighth of January instead, a modern pastoral accommodation for churches that no longer treat every fixed feast as a holy day of obligation. The date is older than the Western meaning now attached to it. In the early church, before December the twenty fifth was fixed as the date of Christ's birth, January the sixth was itself the primary feast of Christ's manifestation, covering his birth, his baptism and, in some traditions, his first miracle at Cana all together, particularly in the churches of the Greek speaking East.

Once Rome adopted the December date for the Nativity in the fourth century, the West needed a distinct meaning for the older January date rather than two feasts commemorating the same birth, and the visit of the Magi, a relatively minor detail within the wider infancy narrative, became the Western Epiphany's defining theme, the revelation of Christ to the Gentile world represented by the visiting magi. The Eastern churches took the opposite path, keeping January the sixth centered on Christ's baptism instead under the name Theophany, so the same ancient date now carries two quite different primary meanings depending on which half of the early church's split inheritance a calendar follows.