Wishing you a restless Advent

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 06, 2024

The season of Advent is upon us. I said Advent, not Christmas. Christmas is coming, of course—that’s the reason for this season of anticipation—but the Christmas season is not yet here.

Every year at about this time, my I am struck once again by the contrast between the quiet anticipation proper to Advent and the frantic noisy bustle of the hyper-commercialized “holiday season.” I say that I am “struck,” but it would be more honest to say that I am frustrated. The “holiday season” encroaches on my Advent.

When I complain about this encroachment (as I often do; see below), friends and neighbors tell me that if I am not actually the Grinch, I must confess to being a curmudgeon. But am I a curmudgeon for wanting to let Advent be Advent? For wanting to celebrate Christmas during the Christmas season? Would I also be playing the curmudgeon, then, when I suggest that the best time to celebrate the Fourth of July is on July 4?

Yes, I know: Everyone feels the urge to get together and share the joy of the season. But what season? “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” [Eccl 3:1] My quarrel is not with the partying, but with the timing of the parties.

In fact, 15 years ago I addressed the question of pre-Christmas parties. My complaint seems equally valid today. Bear with me, loyal readers, if I repeat it:

Are you planning a Christmas party sometime in the next 3 weeks? If you are, and you’re thinking of inviting me, I can save you the cost of a postage stamp. Thanks, but I won’t be attending.

This year I’ve made a small resolution: I’m not attending any Christmas parties during Advent.

To tell the truth this will be easy for me, because I live in a small town with a small circle of friends, and most of my professional acquaintances are far away, reachable only by electronic communications. I’m not exactly swamped with invitations. Still I wonder what would happen if others took even a step or two in the same direction, to discourage premature celebrations.

Advent is a season of preparation, and it’s just plain wrong to prepare and celebrate at the same time. We’ll all be making material preparations for Christmas Day: buying presents, wrapping them, hiding them from sight. If you open all the presents now, you won’t have the same thrill of excitement on Christmas morning. The same is true of spiritual preparations. We all need to spend some time in quiet reflection, realizing how desperately we need a Savior. That quiet reflection—which is incompatible with partying—steady builds a sense of longing that then explodes into the joy of the Nativity celebration. Without that time of reflection you cannot build the same longing; without the longing you cannot experience the same explosion of joy.

There’s great wisdom behind the Church’s liturgical calendar. We need the time of preparation, for emotional as well as spiritual reasons. We need Advent, and I for one am not going to miss it.

Then when Christmas does arrive, remember that the feast only begins on the 25th. There are 12 days of Christmas: that’s a reality, not just a song. Plenty of time for parties, and I’ll be in the mood.

Timing is critical. If the parties are all held before Christmas—earlier and earlier, as hosts try to avoid the rush—then both the decorations and the party-goers are wilting by the time Christmas Day arrives. So the premature celebrations that nearly erase Advent also sap the joyous energy from the Christmas season. Advent never happened, and the Christmas season is shrunk to a single day; the trees are out on the sidewalk, ready to be carted away, on December 26. Well, don’t call me a Grinch then; at our house the parties will just be getting started.

In early December of 2017 an unwanted email message roused my annoyance, and I waded into the argument once again:

Last week a spectacularly tasteless ad arrived in my In box, from a firm that promised me a brilliant new Christmas-gift idea.

(If you read on, you’ll understand why I will not identify either the firm or the gift. This misbegotten idea will receive no publicity—not even negative publicity—from me.)

The “brilliant new idea” was a gift that I could buy for myself. The urge to buy things for yourself isn’t exactly the greatest manifestation of the true Christmas spirit. But that was only the beginning of the problem in this case.

Actually, the ad promised 24 gifts. If I plunked down a considerable sum of money, this firm would send me one Christmas gift for each day. These gifts would begin arriving on December 1, and there would be another for every day until December 24.

And then the gifts would stop. On Christmas Day.

Do you see what’s happening here—aside from the flagrant appeal to self-indulgence? The firm was identifying the “Christmas season” as the period leading up to Christmas. Once Christmas arrived, the “Christmas season” was over!

Faithful Christians enjoy Advent as a season of anxious anticipation. The eagerness with which we look forward to celebrating the Incarnation is dampened if we hit the party circuit too early. But again, that’s only the beginning of the problem with this perverse advertisement.

What I found most striking about this firm’s pitch was the unabashed suggestion that I should celebrate the Christmas season right up until Christmas Eve, and then stop. Just as the religious observance began, this crassly commercial operation would close down.

Here, in one dumb online advertisement, was an example of the American secular celebration of “the Christmas season” at its worst. To say that the holy day had been drained of religious significance would be an understatement. Any thought about Christ’s birth had been dropped out of the thinking of this firm’s publicists long ago. Now they had gone much further. Having taken Christ out of Christmas, they were now prepared to remove Christmas day from the Christmas season.

And why not? If the Christmas season is made merry by shopping and by office parties and by music in the malls, we might as well acknowledge that those things stop on Christmas Day: a holiday, when stores and offices are closed and families stay at home. If the season is made merry by the realization of year-end profits at big-box stores, those profits have already been reaped, and the advertising managers can relax at last. It’s all over.

But for us Christians, it’s only just beginning. We’re human, and we can be caught up in the pre-Christmas excitement: the rush to shop and to prepare, the jingling and the ho-ho-hos. That’s only natural. But we know that the parties and the presents are only the superficial manifestation of a deeper joy. We don’t look for satisfaction in the gifts—and certainly not in whatever gifts we give to ourselves!—because we know that these things always fail to satisfy. There’s a let-down waiting for anyone who looks forward to Christmas solely because of the gifts under the tree. There’s an infinitely more valuable gift, offered to anyone who awaits it. And the more eagerly we await it, the more it will satisfy.

“Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.” Restless: that’s the best word to describe the feeling of Advent anticipation. Come, Lord Jesus!