Keeping Icons at Home
In brief
Orthodox Christians keep icons in the home — Christ, His Mother, one's patron saint, the feast — not as religious decoration but as windows for prayer and reminders that the household lives in God's presence. This entry is about the icons themselves: which ones a home should have, where they belong among the rooms, how they are treated and venerated, and what to do with an icon too damaged to keep.
Which icons
There is no fixed list and no wrong number, but a home almost always begins with two: an icon of Christ and an icon of the Theotokos holding her Son. From there a household gathers icons that tell its own story — the patron saints whose names the family members bear, the saint of the parish, a guardian angel, the great feast the family loves. Many icons enter a home as gifts: given at a baptism, a wedding, or a name day.
The main gathering-place for these is the icon corner — the dedicated prayer space treated in its own entry. But icons are not meant to be quarantined there. In traditional Orthodox homes they are found throughout: over the front door, in bedrooms and the kitchen, in children's rooms, even in the car. Wherever one is, an icon turns the space into a place where prayer is natural.
Where they go and how they are treated
Placement follows a simple instinct: an icon is given an honorable spot, not a leftover one. It is hung or stood high rather than low, kept clear of clutter, and never treated as one framed picture among others — not set as ornament above the television or crowded onto a shelf of knick-knacks. A vigil lamp or a candle is often kept burning before the principal icons, a small flame that says a household is awake to God.
Icons are venerated, not merely displayed. To venerate an icon — a bow, the sign of the cross, a kiss — is not to worship wood and paint; the honor is directed through the image to the one it depicts. St. Basil made the point about the Father and the Son, and the Fathers of the Seventh Council applied it to images: "the honour paid to the image passes on to the prototype." A newly acquired icon is customarily blessed by a priest before it takes its place. (On how the faithful venerate, see venerating icons.)
Caring for icons — and retiring them
Day to day, care is ordinary: keep icons clean and free of dust, tend the lamp, handle them gently. What surprises newcomers is the end of an icon's life. Because an icon is holy matter — sanctified, blessed, an image of a holy person — it is never simply thrown in the trash when it is broken, faded, or worn past recognition.
Instead a damaged icon is reverently retired, in the same way as other blessed objects: it may be burned and its ashes buried, or buried whole, or, most simply, returned to the parish, where the priest will see to it. The reverence is not for the material as such but for what it has represented and the blessing it has carried. An icon is treated, from the day it enters a home to the day it leaves, as a member of the household's life of prayer.