Three Kings Day Celebration/Dia de los Reyes

Celebration

The 7th was the Feast of the Epiphany, so belated Epiphany blessing one and all.

Epiphany celebrates the day when the wise men came from afar. This is important if you display a crèche (nativity scene) in your home because one doesn’t display the wise men until Epiphany which is the celebration of their arrival at the manger. (Don’t befuddle yourself over the logistics.) My afar is behind the Japanese pot where they spend the Christmas season.

Epiphany is useful because:

• You know when the Christmas season is officially over. No waiting for Wal-Mart to tell you.

• There is no frantic rush to get the decorations down by New Year’s Day. There are five more days left of the twelve days of Christmas which ends, well, twelve days later with Epiphany.

Last year I decided to host a Kings Day party on Epiphany. How cool would that be? Oh, if I had only known.

When was the last time you attended a Kings Day party? Like never? All this is to say that the guests saw it as exotic at best, but they were game. They’d never attended one before. I can assure you they never will again.

The highlight of a Three Kings party is cutting and eating the Kings cake. I have no clue what goes into a Kings cake except five pounds of sugar and a baby Jesus figure. You may remember I use my oven for storage and I have no cake pans. No way this was could to be a homemade cake made in my home. So I take myself to a market specializing in Hispanic food products and sure enough, Kings cakes stacked to the ceiling. I left so pleased with my cake and myself.

Party day arrives. I never miss a teachable moment, especially with a captive audience. I share some of the practices of both cultures and close my lecture with the highlight of the celebration—eating the cake.

Back to baby Jesus in the cake. The guest who finds baby Jesus in their piece will have blessings the rest of the year. Excitement builds.

I cut the cake, and the very first piece I serve has plastic baby Jesus in it—but only the bottom half. All levity is sucked out of the room. Everyone is tentatively poking around in their cake desperately hoping they don’t find anything.

We hear a shriek from the kitchen, and we knew who found the upper half.

I had whacked that plastic baby Jesus right in two, neat as you please. I assumed baby Jesus would be metal. Talk about bringing festivities to an abrupt end, that’ll do it. The guest with the top half looked at me with horror and said, “Well, now what?!” Damned if I knew.

I won’t be having a Three Kings/ Dia de los Reyes celebration this year…or ever.