Christmas Sunday is a name for the Sunday after Christmas.
In the United Kingdom, if Christmas Day falls on a Saturday, 26 December is sometimes referred to as "Christmas Sunday", and Boxing Day moves to 27 December, although this practice has now fallen out of common usage and 26 December is usually referred to as Boxing Day even when it falls on a Sunday.
In Western Christianity, the first Sunday after Christmas is called the "First Sunday of Christmas".
Christmas Sunday usually coincides with the "Sunday After the Nativity" feast day that commemorates King David, Saint Joseph (who is called "Joseph the Betrothed"), and James the Brother of the Lord. Special hymns for these saints are found in the Menaion, which are combined with hymns for the Feast of the Nativity, and special Epistle and Gospel readings are chanted at the Divine Liturgy. If there is no Sunday between December 25 and January 1, this feast is moved to December 26, where it is combined with the Synaxis of the Theotokos. The Saturday After Nativity also has a special Epistle and Gospel reading (though no hymns, except those of the Afterfeast). The Saturday Before Theophany has a special Epistle and Gospel reading of its own, and if both days fall on the same Saturday, both sets of readings are chanted.
Famous quotes containing the words christmas and/or sunday:
“A woman spent all Christmas Day in a telephone box without ringing anyone. If someone comes to phone, she leaves the box, then resumes her place afterwards. No one calls her either, but from a window in the street, someone watched her all day, no doubt since they had nothing better to do. The Christmas syndrome.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)