Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord

Okay, we celebrated this feast on Sunday, January 11. It is more or less assigned to January 13, but celebrated on the Sunday following the feast of the Epiphany, which is January 6 but moved to the first Sunday in January. Also oddly, the Feast of the Epiphany is considered to be a celebration of [...]

On the twelfth day of Christmas…

The Three Kings Tell Herod of Christ's Birth. Etching. 1549. Augustin Hirschvogel. National Gallery of Art. Public domain. I made Split Pea Soup to celebrate. I used the bone from our Christmas ham, a 16 oz bag of split peas, carefully rinsed, and bought several months ago because around here you can't buy split peas [...]

Blessed Fra Angelico

Diane Tucker’s blog, the Shy MuseumGoer, has a new posting about Blessed Fra Angelico. The pictures are beyond lovely and her descriptions are illuminating, as always. https://theshymuseumgoer.com/2025/11/15/explore-fra-angelico-paintings/ Diane Tucker is the kind of person who takes a friend to the museum, and pretty soon has half a dozen other people following her around, pretending it’s [...]

Looking back at Matisse

I used to take small children to the museums in DC. On one occasion we visited an exhibit of Matisse. I thought of this when I was browsing through past blog entries of The Shy Museumgoer and came across her entry on Matisse from 2022. https://theshymuseumgoer.com/2022/11/06/matisse-paints-joy-and-simple-pleasures/ She gives a lovely description of why he painted [...]