Posted on 11/30/2005 12:38:20 PM PST by A.A. Cunningham
That incredible shrinking Advent-Christmas season
Twenty-one years in Washington, D.C., should have rendered me impervious to the bizarre. But I confess to having been taken aback in mid-October when, inside a grocery where I was vainly searching for some decent Peccorino Romano, I saw an enormous Christmas display with ersatz snow and all the trimmings. It was bad enough when stores started putting out the Christmas decorations (or, as they now say, “holiday decorations”) a nanosecond after sweeping their shelves of leftover candy corn and other Halloween goodies beloved of dentists with medical school bills to pay. But Santa and the elves two weeks before Halloween?
It works the same way at the other end, so to speak. The estimable Father John Jay Hughes reports that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a feature article last December 26 on how to disassemble and store Christmas decorations. As Father Hughes commented, “In my childhood, thanks to my Anglican priest-father, we were never permitted to put up the tree or any Christmas decorations until Christmas Eve. And once up, they stayed there until at least the Octave of Epiphany” (which, I’d perhaps better note, would be January 13 — if, that is, the bishops hadn’t moved Epiphany from its proper date to a nearby Sunday, a folly surpassed only by the biblical absurdity of Ascension Thursday Sunday).
Fifteen years of intense involvement with Poles and Poland has given me an even more capacious view of the Christmas season. In Poland, the decorations stay up, the Christmas carols are sung, and the celebration of the Incarnation continues until February 2, the Feast of the Presentation, or Candlemas. That’s the way it was in the papal apartment in Rome between 1978 and 2004. And that’s the way it will be in Poland’s intact Catholic culture this year.
Railing against secular America’s calendrical translation of the “Christmas season” into a period between mid-October and 8 a.m. December 26 (or whenever the post-Christmas sales start at the malls) is of less importance, though, than trying to ensure that the Church’s Advent and Christmas seasons are not temporally hijacked by the surrounding culture. If memory serves, Advent got exceedingly short shrift last year, being essentially just three weeks long: which meant twenty-five percent less time to reflect on the two great themes of that wonderful time — the Second Coming and the Incarnation. Worse yet, more and more Catholic churches seemed to be succumbing to the secular redefinition of the seasons by putting up Christmas decorations during the third or even second week of Advent. The truncation was just as bad at the far end, what with the transfer of Epiphany to Sunday, January 2.
We need more Advent and Christmas, not less — but we need them at the proper time, which is the Church’s time, not Macy’s time or Wal-Mart’s time. Taking Advent seriously would be a good beginning. The widespread use of Advent wreathes in churches is a welcome development. Even more welcome would be pastors actively encouraging every Catholic family to have an Advent wreath in their home, to learn the rituals of lighting it, and to pray together at the nightly lighting of the wreath during one of the most spiritually rich seasons of the Church’s year of grace.
Reconstituting the liturgical calendar would also help. The Solemnity of the Epiphany belongs on January 6, period. Restoring Epiphany to its proper place would do justice to a generally neglected feast; in a nifty countercultural move, it would also stretch the Christmas season back to its proper length. And while we’re on the Epiphany, why not stretch it out, too? Bringing back, say, three “Sundays After Epiphany” would give the Church a greater opportunity to pray over the mission-to-the-nations, one of the great themes embedded in the Lord’s “epiphany.” What’s the rush to get to “Ordinary Time” (an ill-advised moniker if ever there was one)? Wouldn’t it be spiritually beneficial to spend more time in that extraordinary time marked by Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany?
Let’s be different. Let’s let liturgical time define this unique time of the year.
George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Weigel’s column is distributed by the Denver Catholic Register, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Denver. Phone: 303-715-3215.
Lambswool punch
That is one of our activities too. With chalk that has been blessed as a sacramental. Then the family will say a blessing for their home.
Of course.
We are packed as well. We actually have to have 2 masses simultaneously. One in the church itself and the other in the parish hall.
I always wonder if these "holiday Catholics" feel funny about showing up twice a year.
We observe Advent with fasting and prayer. We put our tree up the evening of the 4th Sunday of Advent but don't light it until Christmas Eve. We leave it up through Jan. 6. We celebrate Ephiphany with a party and bless our house.
St. Nicholas leaves chocolate coins on the children's shoes on St. Nicholas' Day.
I do hang a wreath on the door so we don't look too strange to our neighbors.
**I always wonder if these "holiday Catholics" feel funny about showing up twice a year.**
We have experienced great success in putting an invitation to our returning Catholics program (which we do once a year after Easter) in the Christmas bulletin. It is astounding how many phone calls we get about our "Catholics Can Come Home Again" class.
Epiphany falls on January 6th, not the 8th.
December 26th is the 1st day of Christmas, the 27th is the second, etc...
January 6th is thus the 12th day of Christmas.
Hmmm...I always started counting with December 25 = 1st Day so that January 5 = 12th Day; eve of Epiphany therefore Twelfth Night.
You may very well be right. I had thought that 12th Night celebrations happened on the day of Epiphany itself -- the last fling of the feasting before ordinary time again started the next day.
In the West, Epiphany is linked to Christmas thematically, since it commemorates the coming of the Wise Men, so it made sense to me that Epiphany itself would be the 12th day. I may be completely wrong in my memories.
In Orthodoxy, Theophany (Jan 6) is not thematically linked to Christmas in the same way. Since we commemorate the Baptism of Christ, at which the "worship of the Trinity was made manifest," it is not linked to the events surrounding the birth of Christ the way it is in the West.
We actually read the account of the Wise Men at Liturgy on Christmas Day itself, as the culmination of the Christmas story. The Old Testament prophecies of Christ and the other Gospel passages regarding the birth of Christ have already been read by that point (at the Royal Hours in on the morning on the Eve, at the Vesperal Liturgy around mid-day of the Eve, at at Matins of the Vigil of the Nativity.
There is even a delineation between Nativity and Theophany by making the Eve of Theophany a strict fasting day, just as the eve of the Nativity is a strict fasting day. Liturgically, Theophany is actually a higher ranking feast than the Feast of the Nativity in the Orthodox Church.
There is more liturgical hoopla for us at Theophany as well, since that is when we do the Great Blessing of the Waters (both in the Church for the year's supply of holy water at at the nearest large body of water), and when the priest goes around to all the houses of parishioners to bless their homes for the year.
More than you wanted to know. If you find out definitive answers, let me know.
I don't understand the problem. The original date for Christmas was chosen to replace a pagan sun-god festival. There's nothing sacred about doing it a certain time of year. If we truly followed the early churches, we would keep on re-Christianizing the seasons.
In our church we used the first 3 weeks of November as a time of fasting and penitence. We started our feasting on Thanksgiving and will continue until Christmas. It honors the pattern of fasting before feasting yet allows us to give new meaning to the festivities. Many have already commented how different it's felt to participate in Christmas festivities this year. There is greater meaning, we enjoy the carols with everyone else, and the fasting created a space that allows us to enter in with true joy.
As a side-note, did you know that Caesar Augustus inaugurated a 12-day celebration called Advent to celebrate his birth? The early church just took that secular party and made it about Jesus.
An interesting tidbit is that the feast of the Annunciation on March 25th is actually quite a bit older than that of the Nativity.
The Nativity of Christ comes exactly 9 months later, on Dec 25th.
Thus, there is a strong case to be made that while Christmas did displace the "sol invictus" pagan feast, and coincides with the general time of the winter solstice, there may be ancient traditions within the Christian world that preserved the memory that the Archangel Gabriel visited the Virgin on or around March 25th.
Not a thing that is likely to be forgotten...
My mother, of blessed memory, always denied that Christmas was on December 25 because it replaced the Saturnalia. She pointed out what you just posted, namely that the Feast of the Annunciation had been celebrated even before Christmas and always on March 25. The calculation is easy to make. She said that her grandmother had told her this and she had heard it from hers and on back through the centuries.
Whether March 25 predates the absorption of pagan holidays doesn't counter the point that I made: That many parts of the liturgical calendar are a result of Christianizing what were pagan celebrations. Why not continue to do the same, and make so that our feasting and fasting days are congruent with the how our cultures holidays have evolved. We can re-Christianize it again.
What is the Angelus? I know it's a prayer, could you send me a link about it?
Very beautiful comments. I especially liked this:
"The question is not how many presents will I get, but how many presents can I give to my Lord?"
And even if we are very poor, we can always give him our heart and our life.
Here you go!
http://www.ewtn.com/Devotionals/prayers/Angelus.htm
Thank you. I'll bookmark it.
I would describe what happened somewhat differently, namely that the popularity of certain Christian feasts were perhaps greater because they coincidentally fell close to certain pagan festivals.
This is obvious from the fact that in different parts of the Christian world, different feasts take on different levels of popularity, depending on what pre-existing local festivals were there. Old habits die hard, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I once remarked to our priest that I found it interesting that at our parish, our Wednesday evening vespers service is pretty well attended, often better so than vespers services for higher ranking feasts that occur on other days of the week. He pointed out that in America, Wednesday is traditionally "church night," and that the many converts to Orthodoxy are already used to going to church on Wednesday night.
Likewise, we always have an excellent turnout for liturgies on Thanksgiving Day (regardless of what feast falls on that day), and on New Year's day (for the Feast of the Circumcision/Feast of St. Basil the Great.) This is because people are off work on those days.
These sorts of things, of course, happen naturally.
The question, of course, is whether Christianity transforms culture or whether it follows it and is blown with whatever cultural wind exists.
Modern Christianity in America doesn't seem to transform culture, it seems to follow it. It doesn't displace secular society, it comes up with poor "Christianized" imitations and substitutes. Just look at the drivel that passes for Christian music, especially these days.
At the core of the successful transformation of the pagan world into Christendom was an opportunistic Christianization of paganism, but rather the willingness to have a radical discontinuity with the surrounding society. The earliest feasts were those held on the anniversaries of the martyrdoms of Christians slaughtered by the surrounding culture.
Orthodoxy is not going to change its cycle of feasts and fasts. But if Protestant churches are able to find ways to transform, rather than imitate, the surrounding secular culture, more power to them. I just haven't seen that American Christianity has the strength or aptitude for it.
Very interesting! You are the first person who has confirmed for me what I thought must exist -- a living tradition of why Christmas is celebrated when it is.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.