Sunday 26 December 2021

✝ j.m.j. ✝

Venerated on the Sunday between Christmas Day and New Year’s (or traditionally, before 1969, on the first Sunday after Epiphany), the Feast of the Holy Family is celebrated to honour as a familial unit Jesus, His mother Mary and His step-father Joseph—presenting their relationship as a model for good Christian families, though relatively little is mentioned canonically about the upbringing of Christ after the Nativity. A popular art subject from the late fifteenth century onward, sometimes the depictions went beyond the nuclear family with Anne, Mary’s cousin, and John the Baptist included—though never later portrait studio editions with his four brothers, James, Joses, Jude and Simon and unnamed sisters.