The End of the Paschal Candle

Remember when we brought home the old Paschal candle from church to burn? That turned out to be way more fun than I thought it would be.

First of all, it was cool to have such a big candle in the house. It was about a foot tall when we started burning it, which is the biggest candle I've ever had at home. 

Also, it was decorated on the outside with raised wax that burned in an interesting way. For instance, the blue raised cross on the front resisted melting when the wax around it was melting, which resulted in the cross being much more prominent for awhile. The gold paint used on it looked really neat when it melted, too, all sparkly and forming a separate pool of molten wax in the middle of the melted clear wax.

Since this is a Paschal candle, it is lit in our church only for the Easter season, baptisms, and funerals. I decided we would just burn it during the Easter season and then bury the remains.* The Easter season runs from Easter Sunday through Pentecost Sunday, which was last Sunday. We burned it all day on Sundays in that time, as well as a couple of other rainy, dark days. 

By this weekend, all that was left of the candle was a pit in the sand I had secured it in, with melted wax in it. I had sunk the candle down a couple of inches in the sand to make sure it wouldn't tip, so the pit was pretty deep. The heat from the flame continued to melt wax around the outside that then flowed into this pit, and so the flame kept burning, even with no actual candle left.

It was actually really neat to see this, particularly on Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost is the celebration of the Holy Spirit being sent to the church. The Bible story about this describes the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire from heaven coming to the apostles, which made this ever-burning little flame in our house most appropriate.

I kept thinking that surely the flame would go out anytime during the day on Sunday, but it was still burning when I went to bed. A. finally blew it out before he went to bed.

I was kind of curious to see how much longer it would have burned like this, but the children were adamant that Easter was over and so we couldn't burn the candle anymore. Poppy took it upon herself to dig the hole and bury the remains.

She marked the spot appropriately, too.

Thus ends the Paschal candle. We don't replace it at church every year--it's originally about three feet tall, so it doesn't burn down all that fast--which means we won't have one next year, but it was fun while it lasted.

* This candle had been blessed, so it had to buried, not just thrown in the trash.