The Feast of the Immaculate Conception celebrates belief in the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is universally celebrated on December 8, nine months before the feast of the Nativity of Mary, which is celebrated on September 8.
It is the patronal feast day of Spain, Korea, Portugal, Nicaragua, Brazil, the Philippines and the United States of America. It is celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church as well as a few other closely related Christian churches.
The feast is often celebrated with Holy Mass, parades, fireworks, processions, ethnic foods, and cultural festivities in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary and is generally considered a "family day", especially in many Catholic countries.
Read more about Feast Of The Immaculate Conception: History, Cultural Impact, Anglican Communion, Eastern Orthodoxy, Lutheranism
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“I know that there are many persons to whom it seems derogatory to link a body of philosophic ideas to the social life and culture of their epoch. They seem to accept a dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbèd, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo’s lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets,
Where no crude surfeit reigns.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“They have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)