Tomorrow is the first day of the Christian year, the first Sunday of Advent. For those not familiar with it, Advent is the season of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Christ; it’s a very different thing from what the world calls “the Christmas season,” though the two run together. As Joseph Bottum put it in First Things,
Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale. Every secularized holiday, of course, tends to lose the context it had in the liturgical year. Across the nation, even in many churches, Easter has hopped across Lent, Halloween has frightened away All Saints, and New Year’s has drunk up Epiphany.Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.More Christmas trees. More Christmas lights. More tinsel, more tassels, more glitter, more glee—until the glut of candies and carols, ornaments and trimmings, has left almost nothing for Christmas Day. For much of America, Christmas itself arrives nearly as an afterthought: not the fulfillment, but only the end, of the long Yule season that has burned without stop since the stores began their Christmas sales. . . .Even for me, the endless roar of untethered Christmas anticipation is close to drowning out the disciplined anticipation of Advent. And when Christmas itself arrives, it has begun to seem a day not all that different from any other. Oh, yes, church and home to a big dinner. Presents for the children. A set of decorations. But nothing special, really.It is this that Advent, rightly kept, would prevent—the thing, in fact, it is designed to halt.
It’s an excellent meditation on the meaning and purpose of the discipline of Advent, and why we need it; I encourage you to read the whole thing.