Think of a number

Any number you like (the power of suggestion! ;-)

As is often the case with my blips, the picture above has little or nothing to do with the words below, and now that I have played my little visual joke on a tiny handful of viewers in my inner circle, the same is true here.

I checked and there is definitely no St Bridget, nor St Bride, there was even difficulty in pronouncing those names. I went off-piste and asked if there was a St Nyfi (the Greek word for bride) and no there isn't. Nyfi can also be spelled Nymfi but the letter m remains silent. 'Mania' is also a Greek word and I shall let you work out for yourselves whatever it is I am not telling you here. (Though I will add that generally, when strapping two words together to make one longer word, they are usually connected with a letter “o”)

What I find particularly sweet (and innocent!) about the Greek word nyfi is that it does not only relate to the wedding. After the wedding the groom will refer to his spouse (syzigos) but his mother will still refer to her "nyfi" and so nyfi means daughter-in-law as well as bride.

Forty days crops up an awful lot in Greek culture. The rest of the Christian world uses forty days to measure Lent, which the Greeks do not, but they do use it to measure all sorts of other things; the time it takes to cure olives for example and also the time it takes a person to reach Heaven's Pearly Gates following their demise.

Greek tradition dictates that after the birth of a baby, mother and child accept no visitors for the first forty days, with the exception of immediate family. So had the BVM been of Greek origin she would not have shown her baby Jesus to his gift-bearing visitors until today, 3rd Feb.

Once the forty day mark is passed, mother and child should visit the local priest for a blessing prior to their public debut, this is to 'protect' them until such time as the baby is baptised. Seemingly a blessing provides only local protection because it is necessary to perform a full baptism prior to any significant journeys. So now you know :-)