Maybe you won't like my answer but I would counsel someone in your situation where you are a dependent on your parents (presumably a minor or only recently an adult that still relies on his parents) ought to obey the commandment to honor your mother and father. Fasting will be meaningless if it causes you to sin - just as feasting would be. If you stole food in order to feast, it would be silly to ask how to feast correctly since you're sinning in order to feast ostensibly in a religious way. It goes the same for fasting.
Don't disobey or dishonor your parents, you're better off not fasting if that's what it is causing.
Indeed, this is also what I was getting at when I mentioned that when Christians fast, we are never supposed to refuse food offered to us by our hosts, and I had a very loving relationship with my parents so this occurred to me before disobedience, but indeed, it would be wrong to refuse the food your parents give you for reasons of hospitality, or that they require you to eat in obedience, because we are commanded to honor our parents, whereas fasting is not a commandment in Orthodoxy but a tool to control ones passions.
I myself was told not to fast by my parish priest after I developed a chronic digestive ailment, because the risk to my health was a sin outweighing the potential ascetic gain (I have no appetite much of the time and when I do, it is often limited).
Neither does my cousin who is a monk.
Is there an Armenian Orthodox monastery in the US? The only ones I know of are in Jerusalem, Lebanon, at the headquarters of the Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, and Holy Etchmiadzin, the mother church for Armenians, and the oldest cathedral in the world built by a Christian monarch, on the site where during the mission of St. Gregory the Illuminator to Armenia, the miraculous appearance of Christ occurred (correct me if Im wrong, but Etchmiadzin means “God Descended.”)
I'd wish you a Merry Christmas but Christmas isn't till next month.
Merry Christmas and Epiphany!
For those confused by
@ArmenianJohn ’s statement, the largest Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches (the Russian Orthodox, Ukrainian Orthodox, and on the Oriental side, the Copts, Ethiopians and Eritreans) and all Orthodox churches in Jerusalem use the Old Calendar rather than the Gregorian Calendar. The Armenians mostly use the Gregorian, except in the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, however, the Armenian Apostolic Church (the official name of the Armemian Oriental Orthodox) is the last Christian church to maintain the ancient custom of celebrating the Feast of the Nativity and Theophany together, on January 6th, which happens to be December 24th on the Old Calendar (and the liturgical focus is mostly on the Nativity as one might expect). In Jerusalem, the Armenians celebrate the Nativity and Theophany on January 6th on the Julian Calendar, which I think is January 18th Gregorian.
In addition to the Russians and Ukrainians, the Georgians, Serbians, Latvians, Lithuanians, some Poles, those Estonian Orthodox under the Moscow Patriarch, and the monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece and St. Catharine of Sinai in Egypt, and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, and parts of the Orthodox Church in America, among others, use the Julian Calendar. The Coptic Orthodox use the Coptic Calendar, which is identical to the Julian Calendar in every respect except the names and durations of months. In the Coptic Church, Advent falls in the month of Khiakh, and the Advent hymns of the Coptic Church, the
Khiakh Psalmody, are especially beautiful. Actually the while many Orthodox churches have a separate hymnal for Lent and Holy Week, like the Eastern Orthodox
Triodion, the Coptic Church is the only one to also have a special hymnal for Advent (because the Khiakh Psalmody is very different from the Annual Psalmody; the Coptic Church also has a book called the
Paschalion for the last days of Lent, Holy Week and Easter, and unlike most other churches, only uses different liturgical colors - dark blue instead of bright red stoles worn by deacons, and black vestments worn by priests and bishops instead of white, on certain days in Holy Week, before reverting to the white, gold and red vestments for Easter.
@ArmenianJohn - since I am less familiar with Armenian liturgics than with Syriac Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox, although I love the liturgical music of Yekmalyan, and Komitas even more, as well as the ancient chants on which they are based (i also like the lesser known setting of the Patarag by Manas, which reminds me of Yekmalian but is simpler), on Pascha (Easter Sunday) your main service is in the morning rather than just after midnight like in the Coptic, Syriac and most Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic traditions (excepting some Ruthenian and Ukrainian Greek Catholics who used a Latinized form of the Byzantine Rite liturgy prior to Vatican II.
Oh, also, a fun fact: the Georgian Catholics initially used the Armenian Rite rather than the Byzantine Rite, because the Russian Orthodox Church and Georgian Orthodox Church were merged under the control of the Czar, and the Patriarchs of these churches were abolished, with the Russian church being run as a government department until 1917, and initially the Procurator, or government minister in charge of ecclesiastical affairs, would not let the Georgian Catholics use the Byzantine Rite liturgy, so they used the Armenian, because the text of the Armenian Eucharistic liturgy, or Patarag*, is closest to the Byzantine Rite Divine Liturgy. I expect the Georgian Catholics were singing Georgian hymns and using the Byzantine typikon and Byzantine vestments as opposed to the Armenian directory (the Typikon and the Directory specify the rubrics for the liturgical services throughout the year, like what services should be celebrated, when they should be celebrated, what hymns should be used, and so on, but they do not contain the text for the services; the rubrics for Armenian Lent are very different from those for Byzantine Lent, and because of differences like these, I suspect the Georgian Catholics were using an odd hybrid of the Armenian and Georgian-Russian-Byzantine
liturgy).
A sad fact: the largest Sui Juris Eastern Catholic Church was the Armenian Catholic Church, until the Turkish genocide in 1915. Now it is one of the smallest.
*(or Badarak or Soorp Badarak in Western Armenian; - I am slightly dyslexic
@ArmenianJohn so correct me if I am backwards, it means Holy Sacrifice, like the Syriac Orthodox name for the Eucharistic liturgy, the Qurbono Qadisho) is closest to the text of the