Yesterday was the 2 year anniversary of my father-in-law’s passing. I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say, just that we miss him, and I wanted it recorded somewhere. We visited his grave and left some dried hydrangeas (the only flower-like thing left right now), and drew a chalk heart on the road by his plot.
🥲
Today was my last day of maternity leave, and so our toddler is going back to daycare full time. I’ll miss having him home with us all the time. As exhausting as it has been, it’s been fantastic to watch him grow every day, and we’ve done some fun activities together. We took a stab at the Eastern Diocese’s “Christ as Healer Art Project for Kids” activity last week. With a toddler, there was less discussion and much more finger paint…! Haha, we had fun… 🙂
Our little Hagopig is rocking a natural mohawk right now, which looks very cute. However, he also has these long pieces of hair over his ears, that are getting very long, and are starting to look a little silly. We wanted to get his hair cut before my brother-in-law’s wedding next month, and mentioned that to an older Armenian woman we know and love during coffee hour after church. “Oh, no!” she said. “His first haircut should be in church.” Uh… huh? First we had heard of it. But apparently, it’s something still traditionally done in Jerusalem (where this woman was from). We asked our Der Hayr about it, and he said it’s based on an old Jewish tradition and usually done when the child is a little older than ours is now. He’s done a few for our parish, but not a lot of people have requested it recently. It’s something we might do, and he’ll get back to us.
I haven’t really found anything about this tradition online, except a translation of the service in the Mashdots on St. Nersess’ website: https://www.stnersess.edu/services-of-blessing.html
Service for a Child’s First Haircut
Կանոն սափրելոյ զհերս պատանւոյն
English translation of the service from the Mashdots Ritual Book (Մաշտոց).
There’s also this brief mention on St. Sarkis’s website: http://www.stsarkis.org/first-haircut.html
Does anyone know any more about this tradition?
I’ll certainly do an update post if/when we hear back from our Der Hayr!
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