Candlemas: The Feast of Light and Hope, by Jennifer Gregory Miller

By Jennifer Gregory Miller, Catholic Culture, Feb 01, 2026 

Jennifer Gregory Miller is a wife, mother, homemaker, CGS catechist, and Montessori teacher. Specializing in living the liturgical year, or liturgical living, she is the primary developer of CatholicCulture.org’s liturgical year section . See full bio.

From the Archives, originally published in 2014:

On February 2, the Church celebrates the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, forty days after Christmas. In the 1962 calendar the feast is called the “Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary” and commonly referred to as Candlemas. When this feast falls on a Sunday the General Norms of the Liturgical Year and Calendar specifies that Feasts of Our Lord that fall in the General Roman Calendar take precedence over the Sundays in Ordinary Time, so this feast would be celebrated instead of the Sunday in Ordinary Time.

This is considered a “Christmas feast,” even though it is not part of the Christmas season. This the last feast of the liturgical calendar that we commemorate Christ still as an infant child.

Candlemas is an ancient feast that has developed over the centuries. In the early Church’s liturgy, January 6 was a combined feast with Christmas, Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord, with February 14 being the date for forty days after January 6. The famous pilgrim Egeria who traveled to the Holy Land between 381 and 384 AD. recorded the feast of the Presentation on the 14th. I do wonder if our modern St. Valentine’s Day might have originally been an offshoot of Candlemas falling on this date? …

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