Women’s Christmas

Curious About Joy:

A Retreat for Women’s Christmas

Sunday, January 5, 2025

10:30 AM to 1 PM
Lunch provided

at St. Martin’s Lutheran Church
2427 Church Street
Cross Plains, WI 53528

From Jan Richardson, founder of the Sanctuary for Women, we offer to you again a Women’s Christmas Retreat.

There is a custom, rooted in Ireland, of celebrating Epiphany (January 5, which brings the Christmas season to a close) as Women’s Christmas. Women’s Christmas originated as a day when the women, who often carried the domestic responsibilities all year, took Epiphany as an occasion to celebrate together at the end of the holidays, leaving hearth and home for a few hours of rest and reflection.

Whether your domestic commitments are many or few, Women’s Christmas offers an opportunity to pause and step back from whatever has kept you busy and hurried in the past weeks or months. As the Christmas season ends, this is an occasion both to celebrate with friends, and also to spend time in reflection before diving into what this new year will hold.

Are you curious about joy? In a time when the anguish of the world can flatten it right out of us, how might we become intent on joy instead of giving up on it? How might it be to approach joy as a practice—one that does not hinge on ignorance of circumstances but staying present in the midst of them? How does celebration—the public face of joy—enable us to keep turning toward the world and each other?

With reflections and images from Jan Richardson’s own searching, this year’s retreat offers a space to pray, to imagine, to rest, and to dream about how joy happens for you, and how we might be part of how it happens for others.

Please register by December 31 to help with planning. You will receive a resource in advance to print, read and ponder as time allows. A simple meal will be provided. Please consider inviting friends who might benefit from this time of renewal with other women.

As last year, we will be collecting a suggested donation of $7 per person to go toward The A21 Campaign, an organization devoted to ending human trafficking and providing sanctuary and healing for those rescued from slavery.

Please check your calendar and sign-up today to join us this January 5!

Please register by no later than December 31.

Wise Women Also Came, by Jan Richardson

Registration
Please register by December 31.