Morning Reflection for December 7, 2010

I’m sure you all have noticed how much earlier the Christmas shopping season seems to start. It used to be that the weekend after Thanksgiving was spent by store employees setting up Christmas decorations and putting out the latest products to be purchased as gifts. Now, that weekend is considered the busiest shopping weekend of the Christmas season (it really isn’t, according to some reports I’ve recently heard), and Christmas sales begin almost right after Halloween. It’s almost as if the major retailers haven’t figured out how to make lots of money on Thanksgiving, so they skip it all together.

The problem is that the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is not the Christmas season. “Sure it is,” you might think. “Look at all the decorations and Christmas sales and Christmas music on the radio. It has to be the Christmas season.” Unfortunately, that’s because it’s become culturally popular to celebrate Christmas earlier and earlier. Until relatively recently, Christians have always celebrated the Christmas season starting on Christmas Day. We all know the song The Twelve Days of Christmas. Those twelve days began on Christmas Day and ended on January 5th, the day before the Feast of the Epiphany, which commemorates the arrival of the Magi from the East. Christmas Day is the beginning of the celebration, not the end.

Because we celebrate the Christmas season so early, we’ve lost Advent. During the Advent season, which lasts for four weeks before Christmas, we prepare ourselves for the celebration of Jesus’ birth, but we also look forward with joyful anticipation to the return of Our Lord at the end of the world. This is the season we should be in right now, not the early Christmas shopping season.

Since we don’t recognize Advent as a culture, we end our Christmas celebrations when we should be just getting started. On December 26th, the Christmas music and decorations go back into storage, and the trees get thrown to the curb. We’ve lost any real extended celebration of Our Lord’s birth.

How should we recognize the Advent season? By preparing ourselves for the celebration instead of prematurely jumping into it as we do now. If you were to visit St. Mary’s Church right now, you’d see that there aren’t any Christmas decorations or trees up at this time, just an Advent wreath and some violet, a traditional color of royalty, to prepare for the coming of Our King and Lord. Visit on Christmas Day and the decorations will be up, the trees will be lit, and we’ll be in the full swing of celebrating Our Lord’s birth. Our celebration will continue until the Feast of the Epiphany, marking the Twelve Days.

For now, we need to ready ourselves for Christ’s coming, and not worry about celebrating His birth too early. For our prayer, may we use this popular Advent hymn: O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

This morning’s song: O Come, O Come Emmanuel, performed by Sugarland