The church year 

The church follows a calendar that in some, but not all, ways corresponds to the calendar on your wall. Christmas is always on the same day, but Easter depends upon a complex system that dates back to the time of Jesus.

The major seasons of the church year surround these two festivals. They both have a time of preparation before them and a time of celebration after.

As the seasons change the colors of the vestments and altar coverings change. Purple is the color for penitence, white for celebration, green for Ordinary Time.

There are more colors as well and more feast days, saints days, and holy days. A full calendar is printed in the Book of Common Prayer but the online version shows the colors.  The seasons are:

Advent

What we celebrate: Jesus will come again!
This starts about the beginning of December. It is a time to look forward to the time when Jesus will come back to earth again. We prepare to meet Jesus by looking at our lives to see what is wrong and needs changing. We also remember when Jesus came for the first time.

Christmas

What we celebrate: Jesus was born as one of us.
The Twelve days of Christmas start with Christmas day. This is a time of rejoicing because God sent Jesus to us to be our saviour.

Epiphany

What we celebrate: Jesus is for everybody, no matter which race they are.
This starts with the twelfth day of Christmas and we think of the visit of the wise men to Jesus after he was born.

What is the Episcopal Church?

The Episcopal Church is the American branch of the Anglican Communion. The Anglican Communion, rooted in the Church of England, inherits a 2000 year old catholic and apostolic tradition dating from Christ himself.  The Anglican Communion, a body headed spiritu­ally by the Archbishop of Canterbury, has some 80 million members, making it the second largest Christian body in the world.
The Episcopal Church came into existence as an independent denomination after the American Revolution. Today it has between two and three million members in the United States, Mexico, and Central America.

Bishops in the American Episcopal Church are elected by individual dioceses and are conse­crated into the Apostolic Succession, which is considered a witness to an unbroken line of Church leadership beginning with the Apostles themselves.
Although it subscribes to the historic Creeds (the Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed), considers the Bible to be divinely inspired, and holds the Eucharist or Lord's Supper to be the central act of Christian worship, the Episcopal Church grants great latitude in interpretation of doctrine. It tends to stress less the confession of particular beliefs than the use of the Book of Common Prayer in public worship. This book, first published in the sixteenth century, even in its revisions, stands today as a major source of unity for Anglicans around the world.

The Church of England has always valued the life of the mind and dialogue with fields of sec­ular study. Isaac Newton was an Anglican cler­gyman and theologian as were several of the founders of the Royal Society, the earliest insti­tution organized for the promotion of science. The Episcopal Church maintains this tradition, routinely requiring its clergy to hold university as well as seminary degrees and supporting many university chaplains.

Women share a long and rich tradition of min­istry in the Episcopal church.  For more than two decades the American Episcopal Church has ordained women to the priesthood. In 1988 the Diocese of Massachusetts elected the first Anglican woman bishop, Barbara Harris, who is one of our bishops here in Massachusetts.