Reclaiming Advent Amid Secular Christmas Celebrations
My wife and I were shopping in Hobby Lobby last week when I overheard a worker say, “We’ve had Christmas stuff out for so long that I’m sick of it already!” Look at the date. It’s only the beginning of December. We still have three weeks to go, and this poor man made his comment nearly a month before Christmas.
It’s no shock for me to say this, but everyone recognizes that secular Christmas celebrations start earlier and earlier each year. The stores used to wait until after Thanksgiving to stock their shelves, but in recent seasons have started selling Christmas decorations as early as October. Somehow this was interpreted by our culture as a go-ahead to put out those decorations as soon as they get home, instead of holding onto them until it’s Christmastime.
As soon as Halloween is over now, it’s up with Christmas. I don’t even see stores sell Thanksgiving decorations anymore! Little by little as we approach the end of November, we’re walking in a winter wonderland. There is something really special about Christmas that brings out the best in people, even in the secular world. It’s not called ‘the most wonderful time of the year’ for nothing. The love of the Lord is so great that it even bleeds through those who haven’t encountered Christ yet.
Christmas brings out our neighbors’ creativity in a way we don’t get to see any other time of the year. As they deck the halls and hang lights from every corner possible, their passion for this joyful time is on full display. Christmas brings out what God makes unique in each of us, in the way we choose to decorate and give gifts to one another.
Each Christmas, I am reminded of the words of St. Paul on his mission to Athens.
“Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” – Acts 17:22-25
Secular Christmas traditions also bring to mind these words from G.K. Chesterton: “Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents… The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone” (The Everlasting Man). Christmas brings out, as Fr. Luigi Giussani would put it, the religious sense native to all men which pushes us to seek God. St. Paul recognizes this religious sense when he compliments the Athenians on their religiosity. They want to find Christ but have never been shown how, so they are left only to the faculties of their imagination to worship the god they think exists. Sound familiar?
There is a reason the secular world has adopted Christmas as their own. The modern pagan’s religious sense was piqued by the curious joy of their Christian counterparts each December. And who doesn’t want to be joyful? Behind this joy and unbeknownst to many is the God who became incarnate and took on our flesh, as a choir of angels sang, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!”
Make no mistake. We live in a post-Christian world and have become the quietest voice. But that is nothing to be alarmed about. It is an exciting time to be a Christian because we have become like the Apostles, trying to introduce a pagan world to Jesus Christ all over again. Instead of the usual frustration we’re apt to feel at their supposed lack of faith, we ought to recognize the religious devotion they hold to the truths they do know and how much more complete their faith will be when they finally meet Christ in the flesh. And that is the role of the baptized Catholic. All have heard of Christ, but how many have met him? Like Saint Paul in Athens, we must show them Our Lord and say, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”
This is where the beauty of Advent comes in. If the secular world was inspired to start celebrating Christmas because of the joy it gives Christians, how much more will their curiosities be heightened at the joy of our Advent celebrations? The Church doesn’t give us a liturgical calendar at random or to make nice suggestions of when to celebrate holy days. The liturgical calendar has a much deeper meaning than meets the eye. The entire cosmos were made for Christ and are ordered towards Christ. Remember, even the wind and the seas obeyed Him. This especially includes the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
Holy days of obligation are strategically ordered towards Christ’s revelation of the Father. Such is the reason Easter is in the springtime, when new life blooms, as is the Annunciation when Christ was conceived in Our Lady’s womb. Since Christ is not merely a historical figure who lived 2000 years ago, the liturgical calendar gives us an opportunity to incorporate ourselves into the life of Christ and walk his footsteps in our own unique way. Each year we journey with Christ to Bethlehem, are born in a manger, receive the blessings of the Three Kings, and are presented in the Temple with the Blessed Mother. We enter into the wilderness with Our Lord for 40 days to better resist the snares of the devil, we go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and enter into Jerusalem with palms at our feet, we are betrayed, we enter into Gethsemane and become sin itself, we are arrested and handed over to Pilate, we are crucified, we die, and we rise again on the third day. We join Our Lord in the Upper Room as He breathes the Holy Spirit on us, we are sent on our mission, and we ascend into Heaven. Most of the year, we sit at the feet of Our Lord to listen to Him preach. And all throughout the year, we honor His Mother and all the Saints who already journeyed with Him, past this life and into the next.
The Feasts of the Saints are most interesting because they indicate to us that created beings like us have and can walk with Our Lord in joy throughout the liturgical year. It is of course possible to still find joy celebrating holy days like Christmas out of season, but the testament of the Saints is the greatest proof we need that we can be more joyful when we order everything, including our Christmas and Advent celebrations, completely towards Christ. After all, joy is the reason Christians and secularists alike celebrate Christmas. And who doesn’t want to be more joyful than they already are? And what better source of joy is there than the God who made us for His friendship, became man, took on the form of a slave for our sake, and purchased our freedom with His blood on the Cross to demonstrate His infinite love?
Left to our own imaginations like the pagans, we can find joy by merit of simply being human. But the liturgical calendar is there for our benefit so we might derive the most joy possible and be fully human. Throughout the course of the year, the Church conveniently gives us two seasons for fasting and penance as an opportunity to cleanse our souls and reorient our focus towards Christ. These are Advent and Lent, however Advent has in our times seemingly lost its penitential properties amid the secular lengthening of Christmas each year. Ven. Fulton J Sheen perfectly explains the importance of appropriately honoring these seasons.
“When all is said and done, there are only two philosophies of life. One is first the feast, then the hangover; the other, first the fast and then the feast. Deferred joys purchased by sacrifices are always sweetest and most enduring. Christianity begins not with sunshine but with defeat. Sunshine religions that begin with psychic elation, end often in disillusionment and despair. So essential is dying to self, the prelude to the true life of self, that there were three monumental attempts to force Christ to abandon His Cross.”
We are asked to fast before the feast not simply ‘because the Church says so’, but because this is what Christ did and we have faith He knows what’s best for us. Advent is furthermore an opportunity to walk with the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph, who for obvious reasons could not celebrate the first Christmas until the birth of Our Lord. Elevating our Advent worship towards its true end will result in greater joys than the ones we already know in our culture’s secular worship of Christmas.
So how, then, can we celebrate Advent? I will share some of the traditions we began in our home, as well as those of our priest when he was a child. I will begin with his to emphasize the impact it had on his life. Our priest grew up with a devoutly Catholic mother who decorated the house not according to the seasons or the whims of our secular culture, but according to the liturgical calendar. Throughout the seasons of Advent and Lent, she would strip the walls of any decorations and leave them bare. They would fast from worldly pleasures such as sweets, eating out, or watching movies and television, and spend more time in contemplation before Our Lord. To resist the temptation of conflating Christmas merely with opening presents, our priest and his siblings were asked to gather one or two old toys each to donate to the less fortunate children. Then, on December 24th, as the Christmas season officially began, they would spend the day baking cookies, putting up lights, decorating the home, and singing Christmas carols until waltzing over to Midnight Mass to celebrate the Nativity of Our Lord.
As the world concluded its Christmas feasts on the 25th, for our priest they were only getting started. To his large Puerto Rican family, 12 days of Christmas was more than just a song. It was real life. And 12 days was an understatement to their feast! They celebrated all the way until the Presentation of The Lord on February 2nd. Their wait made Christmas all the more special, and the proof is in the pudding. He is the most joyful man I’ve had the blessing of meeting, and his family’s liturgical orientation towards Christ assisted him in discovering his vocation to the priesthood and orienting his entire life to Our Lord. His family’s celebrations are what inspired ours.
My wife and I were blessed to celebrate our first Advent oriented towards Christ a year ago with our own firstborn in the womb, giving us an elated communion with the Holy Family. We were in a way already fasting before the feast since July of that year when we found out we were expecting a child. Knowing how joyful Christmastime is, we deferred to find out our child’s gender until December 25th, in my wife’s 6th month of pregnancy. We spent those six months steeped in prayer and growing in faith as we anticipated Christ’s reveal of our child’s identity. Our wait opened the door to blessings we didn’t know possible and made the gender reveal more special than we could have imagined. Of course we would have been joyful had we found out earlier, but it would have been impossible to experience the level of joy we did by waiting.
Last year during Advent, we joined our priest in giving up junk food. He takes it steps further, giving up meat and eating only one meal a day as the ancient Church would during Advent. He also refrains from attending Christmas parties until Christmastime. We fast from meat on Fridays like Lent, and I will eat one meal that day. We also kept the tv off and car rides quiet. I give up alcohol and cigars, reserving only a glass of wine for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on December 8th, and try to stay off social media with the exception of feast days. We spend considerably more time in prayer and say the Divine Offices, novenas, and rosaries. As part of my own devotion, I like to spend more time reading books on the incarnation of Christ, such as The Infancy Narratives by Pope Benedict XVI, or On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius of Alexandria. When possible, my faith benefits greatly from Eucharistic Adoration. Last year I made it a point to go every day in the week leading up to Christmas. Our prayer life has led us to go on a shopping spree each Advent, buying up tons of children’s clothing and toys to donate to charities which give to foster children. As a word of advice if this is a tradition you wish to inherit, you will be able to get clothes for far more children if you go to a thrift store.
Steps like these are the preconditions for the next. As we seek to invite Christ into our hearts, we take steps to invite Christ into our home with joyful anticipation of his birth. We keep a purple table cloth across our dining room table with an Advent wreath and four candles atop it. The Nativity scene is out but empty, with only the animals present. Each week we put out more figures, until finally the Christ child and His parents make their way to the stable on Christmas Eve. The second week of Advent we put out our tree but keep it bare from ornaments, making it an Advent tree for the next three weeks. It helps if you have purple lights or a tree you can program from your phone!
It is a little more difficult to decorate outside for Advent since it’s hard to find anything to buy for the occasion, so you’re going to need a little creativity. To improvise, I ordered four large purple LED candles meant as Christmas decorations, to use for the purposes of our Advent celebration. As of now two candles are lit each night, to signal each week of Advent. If you’re in the mood for lights this soon, you’ll make a big statement decking out your house in nothing but purple lights. It will get all the neighbors whispering, wondering why it looks like you have Halloween lights out in December. Incorporating an Advent celebration into your home is great for the mom who likes to decorate because it gives her two opportunities to do so.
Like our priest, we now spend Christmas Eve flipping the house into Christmas mode and keeping it that way until February 2nd. I ought to mention to that we give proper homage to the feast days that occur throughout the liturgical calendar in December, which there are many of! Here are a list of them for your convenience.
- December 3rd, Feast of St. Francis Xavier
- December 7th, Feast of St. Ambrose
- December 8th, Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception
- December 12th, Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe
- December 13th, Feast of St. Lucy
- December 14th, Feast of St. John of the Cross
Though not considered a major feast day, many like to celebrate the Feast of St. Nicholas on December 6th since he’s become a major part of our Christmas lore. It’s a Catholic tradition for parents to leave shoes outside the night of the 5th for St. Nick to bring small gifts to children the next morning. We spend the major feast days at Mass, out with friends, and hosting gatherings. If you have children, it’s a great opportunity to do something fun with them to teach them of all the holy days which prelude Christmas.
To keep the Christmas season going longer than just one day, we plan on hosting get-togethers with various friends this year and having one family over at a time to increase the number of Christmas celebrations. An idea suggested to us by friends with small children is to give them half their Christmas presents on December 25th and the other half on Epiphany Sunday. And instead of making Christmas revolve around Santa Claus, the mythical character with flying reindeer, a tradition we look forward to incorporating with our children is Saint Nicholas and the intercession of the Saints. Instead of saying their gifts come from a factory on the North Pole, we are excited to say they came from Heaven, with each gift given by a different Saint.
If you’re one to put up lights for Christmas, go all out on December 24th with the greatest light show in town, and keep them up until February 2nd to keep the town abuzz! Evangelization starts by creating a counter-culture that puts our joy on full display. Don’t just talk about Christ this Christmas. Be a Christ, so your neighbors might meet Him through you.
Christmastime is special. So special in fact that it’s worth waiting and celebrating for 40 days once it has begun. Secular celebrations are spectacular and fun, that’s not false. But they rob us of an even greater joy that’s worth celebrating. Especially when the lights come down on December 26th, as the Christmas season is only just beginning. Why end the wedding feast when the bridegroom has only just arrived? Why stop the birthday party when the birthday boy just showed up?
Christmas is not a time to celebrate a past event. It is a feast to celebrate a present reality, that Christ the Savior is born and with us in the flesh today. How joyful we are to give the gift of Christ to a world in desperate need of meeting Him! That is our duty as Catholics. That is our calling. And that is why we must reclaim Advent. We must orient our worship towards Christ, and in the words of St. Paul declare, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” As we do this, Christ will take root in our neighbors and elevate their already pious worship of the truth they know. Recall the creativity and passion on full display each December. Now imagine that same energy oriented towards the Lord! Oh the possibilities.