Episode 8 of the Make Saints podcast.
There’s something about this time of year.
There are two features of this season that we can’t help but exhibit: anticipation and preparation.
We’re all waiting and watching for Christmas. It is coming soon. We want to get ready for it. So we prepare by getting gifts and making things to decorate or give away.
These are really natural parts of the season. Not of the season of Christmas, actually. But the season of Advent: the season before that famous season.
Back when I worked for Barnes and Noble, this was the time of year I dreaded the most. Not because the store got busier, but because we started playing Christmas music on November 1.
Each month, corporate would send us a box of CDs to play in the store, and each time it was 16 or 17 different albums that would be featured for the month. Then, when the month was over, they would go out of rotation as a new collection of albums would come.
The holiday season was different. They sent a box of 12 discs to play over the course of two months. Fewer choices played twice as long.
By the time it really was Christmas, I’d had it with Christmas.
And I know I’m not the only one.
There’s something about this time of year.
There are two features of this season that we can’t help but exhibit: anticipation and preparation.
We’re all waiting and watching for Christmas. It is coming soon. We want to get ready for it. So we prepare by getting gifts and making things to decorate or give away.
These are really natural parts of the season. Not of the season of Christmas, actually. But the season of Advent: the season before that famous season.
Which is actually kind of funny. It’s like Advent and Christmas have a case of mistaken identity.
Mistaken Identity
The season of Christmas begins on Christmas Day. And then goes for twelve days (hence the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with all its daily giving of absurd gifts).
That time before Christmas: that’s Advent. And in Advent, we anticipate and prepare.
So, we should have this totally inline. For Pete’s sake, people buy Advent Calendars that mark the time until Christmas. It is literally in the name!
But our love for Christmas has become something else.
I suspect that what we actually love is Christmas as Advent.
Not so much the arrival of Jesus, but the anticipation of his arrival.
In much the same way that we love preparing to give and receive gifts much more than we love being in the moment.
I’ve long fought this feeling.
What Diana Butler Bass describes as “The War on Advent”. There is no “war” on Christmas, but Advent has long been pushed away, even by most Christians.
I’ve joined with a group called the Advent Conspiracy to make Advent more central to our traditions: to encourage one another to buy less and be with each other more.
I have seen the consumerist impulse of Christmas as a source of sin: precisely because it leads us to do the very things we ought to not be doing. And I have felt it in myself my whole life.
But mostly, I felt the real victim of this mistaken identity isn’t Advent.
The victim is really Christmas.
I have so many memories of Christmas morning, full of joy and eager hope. And Christmas afternoons full of boredom and disappointment. The anticipatory glow faded and the ralization that selfish hopes are always bigger than realities.
And the twelve days: hardly feel Christmasy.
People still say Merry Christmas on the second day, the Feast of St. Stephen. And often the third day. But by the time we get to Holy Innocents, we’re already hearing “Happy New Year’s!”
I resist, of course. I wish everyone a Merry Christmas through the actual Christmas season, like a humbug for Christmas while everyone is done. Trees at the curb days before. But by the time we’re into January for days 7 and 8, “Merry Christmas” feels less like the phrase of a strict adherent and more like the fool who really just needs to shut up and get with the program.
It is telling that the season before Christmas (that is technically not Christmas) is so jolly, but in the season of Christmas, we can’t wait to be done.
Anticipation
I don’t have any bold solutions to Freaky Friday Advent and Christmas back into place. And I suspect I don’t really want to. Because that anticipatory time, when people start to get in the Christmas spirit…that this lasts more than twelve days…is probably a net benefit. People are kinder and generous longer. It makes our time spent more joyous and spirited. And now that I’m not working retail, I’m not inundated with the same 12 albums over and over for 40 hours a week.
But maybe we should also consider what our ancestors were thinking when they set this pattern for their lives.
Because our primary anticipation isn’t for a new iPad or wireless earbuds.
It’s for the coming of Christ. As in here and now.
Gift-giving is our metaphor. It helps us see and feel and know this sensation of generosity and gratitude that Jesus invites us to practice daily. But the gifts aren’t the thing. And even the giving of gifts isn’t entirely the thing. It is that practice of being generous that mirrors the generosity we’re invited into.
But the anticipation of the coming of Jesus is about the gift that he brings: the Kin-dom. God’s great dream for creation. A new world order built around equality and compassion.
Advent isn’t about preparing the same things in the same way for the same feelings so that we can feel them and then go back to normal on December 26th. Advent is about preparing for change.
Advent is about change.
The apocalyptic message, John the Baptizer proclaiming the need to repent, the angel visiting Mary, the preparing for the birth of an immaculate child. Then the birth of the hope of the world! And the king’s fear and treachery, the genocide of children, and the hiding of the holy family.
This is the story of Advent and Christmas we tell because our purpose is not to maintain traditions, but to be changed into the very love of God in creation. And our work in Advent is to prepare for change.
So, as my daughter turns on the Christmas music the day after Thanksgiving, I begin to accept that this is a season of change. For me. For everyone. For everything.
Change away from selfishness and insecurity; hopelessness and greed; hyper-individualism and abusive practices and toward hope, peace, joy, and love.
And we start with hope.