LibGuides: Highlighting Diverse Collections Archive: Coptic Christmas

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Highlighting Diverse Collections: Coptic Christmas

While many folks in the U.S. have been packing up their Christmas decorations, Coptic Christians in Egypt were just celebrating the holiday earlier this month, on January 7. While most U.S.-based Christians follow the Gregorian calendar for the timing of Christmas, Orthodox Christians, including the Copts, follow the Julian calendar. The calendars are 13 days apart, so Orthodox Christmas is celebrated in January.

At the UT Libraries, we have a wonderful selection of print and electronic materials related to Coptic Christmas and Coptic Christianity. Here we present a few items for your consideration.

You can find this post, with the accompanying video reel, on the UT Libraries' Instagram here.

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Resources

My Christmas With the Copts
A short, but sweet, account of a British nurse’s experience helping a family in Upper Egypt. She happened to be staying with this Coptic family when Christmas came around, and it was a very different experience from what she was accustomed to in the United Kingdom.
Coptic devotional calendar (Arabic)
This volume, published in the mid-20th century, is a schedule of readings and hymns to be observed throughout the year. As a liturgical or devotional calendar, it instructs Copts as to what sacred texts they should be reading for Christmas, which takes place in the month of Kiahk/Koiak.
Coptic Textiles in the Brooklyn Museum (Arabic)
Our readers may be interested to see examples of stunningly-preserved Coptic textiles at the Brooklyn Museum. The descriptions in this catalog give us a sense of how old these pieces are estimated to be, the significance of their design, and their likely use in Coptic ritual and life.
Coptic music, curated by Aziz Atiya
In the 1960s, renowned Coptic historian Aziz Suryal Atiya gathered together this collection of Coptic hymns sung by the chorus of the Cathedral of St. Mark. The liner notes of this album are particularly illuminating, as we can read the original Coptic of the hymns as well as their translations, and there is a concise introduction to the history of Coptic religious music.