Christmas seems to come earlier and earlier in the these days, especially in the realm of commercial shopping where now it feels even Thanksgiving gets forgotten about, even though the day we mean to celebrate is at the end of the year. Many of my friends have already decorated their own homes for the holidays, decked complete with fake plastic evergreen boughs and happy banners, and yet I can't help but mourn.....mourn the death of an entire season.
Advent.
Advent, for any one who is new to the concept, is the four weeks that many Christians use to prepare their hearts to receive the miracle on the incarnation of Christ. It is a time to remember that there was a time on this earth before Jesus came to die for us and that many were living only with the promise of a Messiah to save them. It is a time where Christians remember and read the prophetic texts of the Old Testament which hint at what is to come. All this is meant to make the actual day of Christmas that much more fuller, that much more meaningful, because God, in fact, did come down to earth in human form and he came disguised for a time as a poor child to a young unwed mother. This season of 'waiting' is also a reminder that as a Christian people today we are also 'waiting' for Christ's second coming.
The first week of Advent also marks the start of the Christian liturgical year.
I often celebrate this time by preparing my home and my heart for him. And I often center my home worship with an Advent wreath, which I try to make my only Christmas decoration adorning my apartment for as long as I can.
There is this thing I have noticed over the past few years I have spent in the American evangelical protestant church culture: an inherent lack of the acknowledgment of seasons. Christmas and Easter celebrations seem to come only as interruptions in the current preacher series, and only rarely have I seen any kind of spiritual preparation made to prepare our hearts for the weight and the gift of these two days. Should a Christian at some these traditions/denominations choose to participate in the sacrifice of pre-Easter fasting, they most often do so at their own accord, not within the communion of their communities, separating themselves from their local bodies of Christ. And in this, there seems to have been a deep cultural forgetting of these times of preparation, but also of the true celebration of Christmas. Luckily, some protestants have been fighting back with things like the Advent Conspiracy, which seek to spread our American wealth to those who need in and remember the point of the season is about Christ, after all.
In my own home, I try to wait to put up my Christmas boughs and holly until closer to Christmas, but I keep them up when many of my Christian and secular brothers and sisters have already taken them down.
Does anyone remember that the Christmas season is liturgically remembered until 12 days AFTER Christmas, not before, culminating in the Feast of the Epiphany, when the Christ-child is taken before the temple and visited by the old wise men on January 6, and then about a week later when we celebrate Christ's baptism. I mourn that when this day has come the world has already forgotten and taken down their boughs and holly......just at the time we should be celebrating! I take as an example a cafe I used to work at, who last year ordered all Christmas decorations be removed on Christmas Eve, so that when they opened their doors the day after Christmas, it was already Ordinary time to them again.
I don't mean to be all up in my rant. But this bugs me. And it deeply bugs me that as many Christians have limited their seasonal celebrations of Christ's life to only two times a year, they have allowed themselves to be caught up in the commercial seasons of the holidays rather than the historically sensitive liturgical ones. As a Roman Catholic, I LOVE love love that we celebrate the life of Christ with the seasons of the year, and allow ourselves whole seasons to remember what Christ did for us during his ministry on earth. And I appreciate that there are Christians who still live within this rhythm, Lutherans and Anglicans and Orthodox among them.
Next week is the last feast of the Christian liturgical calender: The Feast of Christ the King. And then, over Thanksgiving weekend, I will light the first Advent wreath candle, the candle of prophecy and anticipation. And I am looking forward to celebrating that this year more than the hype of the commercial side of the holiday.
Oh, and you won't see me deck my halls until after the season of anticipation has started, my own way of rebelling against a season of corporate greed which tries to rush one of the most beautiful times of the year.
Waiting can be a most holy cleansing process in and of itself, if we let it. Waiting gives beauty to the gift we are preparing to receive.
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