Friday, November 22, 2013

The Value of Adventtide

Adventtide, the Season of waiting, begins in the Western Rite on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. This year, that Sunday is also 1 December, which makes my OCD part very happy: The Christian Year begins right at the beginning of the month!

Sadly, Advent has almost completely been erased from most Western cultures’ observances and replaced with pre-emptive Christmas celebrations. The goal of Advent is to live in waiting – it is a time of anticipation and desire for the coming Season of Christmas and, more importantly for the Person of Christ. Unsurprisingly, our commercialized, instant gratification-centred culture has simply run roughshod over Advent in favour of an instant Christmas. The result is that Christmas trees are hauled out right after Halloween and Christmas music declaring, ‘It’s the most wonderful time of the year’ begin playing on the radio the day after Thanksgiving (if we’re lucky! I started boycotting one of my local Christian radio stations after they started in on the Christmas music in early November).
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Ignored completely are the days of ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel,’ ‘Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,’ and ‘Come, Thou Long Expected Saviour’ – those songs are still sung, but we hardly have a second to feel what they mean when the next song is ‘Go Tell It On the Mountain,’ Hark the Herald Angels Sing,’ or ‘Joy To The World The Lord Is Come!’ And one would be hard-pressed to find a contemporary Advent song, and the idea of an Advent music collection would be an absurdly bad marketing idea.

The result of our rush to Christmas is that Christmas itself is cut short as the culture shifts abruptly toward New Year’s celebrations. Christmastide is supposed to last a full 40 days, but most of us are so sick of it by the end of December that we can’t wait to take down the decorations and eat the last of the Christmas cookies. If the tree is left up until 6 January (the very first appropriate time to remove Christmas decorations), the offender feels as though he or she must apologise profusely and explain that it’s only still up because of holiday travelling. If it’s left up till 2 February (the actual end of the Christmastide), people conclude that the owner has either died, is a lazy bum, or is into some weird counter-cultural movement to ‘spread Christmas cheer throughout the year.’

Few offices would think about having a Christmas party after Christmas Day, and certainly not after New Year’s Day. Christmas candy and decorations are instantly 50% off on Boxing Day (usually before). Public decorations are gone by the first of the year, and media shift to discussing how best to recover from the holidays. New Year’s resolutions are made to diet off the pounds we gained in our December indulgences. And anyone foolish enough to send Christmas cards toward the end of January would be filled with instant self-shame and subjected to people’s humourous come-backs.

Contrary to all of this, Advent is a separate and unique Season. It is a sombre Season and has historically been a Season of fasting rather than indulgence (a future post will be more about the Advent fast). This is why, in those old movies and TV shows (like Little House on the Prairie), they always show the Christmas tree being brought in on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. Advent was a time for quieting our hearts and learning to live in wonder and anticipation of what God will do.

Gone are the days of decorating on Christmas Eve. The die-hard traditionalist thinks he is observing “Advent” by waiting until the fourth Sunday before Christmas before beginning to enter the Christmas Season. And the last remaining remnant of a traditional Advent in widespread society is the idea that Christmas presents should not be opened until Christmas Day, yet even that practice is rapidly becoming a thing of the past (a friend told me last year that she and her husband had opened their presents closer to the middle of December). We simply do not like waiting, anticipation, or desire.

The Christian may point out that this seems off – that we should not live in anticipation of Christmas because it is in the past. Christ has already come, so why should we live as though He hasn’t? There are many reasons for why reclaiming a traditional observance of Advent would be beneficial.

The first reason is that, as I mentioned in a previous post, Advent is the one time of the year that we Christians connect with our Jewish heritage (though perhaps there is an argument to be made that we should also be doing this during the Fall). Depending on one’s tradition, the Old Testament makes up 75% or more of our Scriptures; that’s a significant amount of OUR Canon that we don’t have much cultural connection to or understanding of. We may cognitively understand that our Old Testament heroes lived under the Shadow of what was to come, but until we’ve lived that a little bit, we can never truly understand them as individuals. Living in Advent helps us understand the psychology of the Old Testament saints.

Second, we always appreciate something more when we have waited for it. We in the modern world, and we in the Western world in particular, take it for granted that Jesus has come. His coming marked a change in counting time and has affected all of Western culture. But that was not always the case, and living under the Shadow for 3 weeks and some change may help us to better appreciate living in the Light. Living in Advent helps us to appreciate what Christmas really means to the Christian.

Third, we can really get some awesome deals. You wouldn’t even have to buy a Christmas tree if you waited until Boxing Day to put it up – just go pick one up from someone’s garbage pile! And those boxes of candy canes that everyone pays $3 for before Christmas? 25¢ after the fact! (Okay, this one is somewhat in jest, but it leads to my next point...)

Fourth, it helps, I think, to disconnect Christmas from the secularized Xmas* festivities that we currently experience in our culture. Blame it on the Germans or the Dutch, but the festival of St. Nicholas, falling on 6 December, is partially to blame for what Western Xmas has become. By reclaiming the traditional Christian Calendar, Christians stand to be able to side-step most of the secular Xmas observances (or, at the very least, make a clear distinction between them and the real Christmas Season). Starting Christmas on the day most people are ending it sets us apart and helps us to live in the difference that we should already be living in anyway. Living in Advent reminds us that we are not a secular, commercialized, material people.

*I am, of course, making reference to C.S. Lewis’ stellar essays ‘Xmas and Christmas’ and ‘What Christmas Means To Me’ found in God In The Dock. If you haven’t read this collection of essays in its entirety, then you really must stop wasting time on this blog and do it immediately.

In my next post, hopefully done later this weekend, I'll explore the four Sundays of Advent and what a more traditional observance of the Season might look like.

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