The Advent and Christmas Jumble

My own kids, our Sunday school kids, and the families in our church community all bring the same question this time of year. How much Christmas should we let seep into the Advent season?

When does the Christmas tree go up?

How soon can we start listening to Christmas music?

I never want to be a scold for taking the fun out of the season for others. It would make me feel like a churchy version of Ebenezer Scrooge. Stop enjoying those Christmas things. It’s Advent! 

People look forward to Christmas for all sorts of reasons, like nostalgia, time with friends and family, and the return of beloved annual traditions. But I suspect that our longing to reach for Christmas earlier and earlier also comes from a hidden Advent sensibility. Inside and outside the church, we are waiting with hope for Christmas and all it signifies.

Let me say it a bit differently. I have a hunch that people look forward to the Christmas season so much in part because it’s the only time of the year when our culture is thinking specifically about what it means to embody goodness, generosity, kindness, and hope. This is the time of year when we get invited to participate in seasonal toy drives, holiday parties, and winter coat collections for our local shelter. Our society kicks into overdrive, beginning a mad dash to cram a full year of goodness, joy, and connection into several weeks at the end of the year.

While some of the frenzy of this time of year comes from our culture’s relentless consumerism, a glimmer of something holy shows up, too. During what society calls ‘the Christmas season’ or what we in the church call Advent, our culture experiences a moment in which we all consciously lift up mercy, generosity, and the spirit of community as the center of everything we do. By starting Christmas rituals earlier and earlier every year, we’re really grasping at the themes of Advent. We’re implicitly acknowledging that the world is not as it ought to be and longing to practice a better way of being together. As Catherine O’Hara’s character describes this time of year in Home Alone 2, “It’s the season of perpetual hope.”

She was on the right track. In Advent, the church proclaims our longing for God to arrive. The world is broken, and we are looking for a Savior. Advent is a time for anticipating, of looking in hope for God’s arrival and the renewal of the world. It is Advent that gives us a framework to understand those longings for Christmas and all that it represents. For that reason, we don’t need to set Advent up in opposition to Christmas, as though we need to endure one to get to the other. Far from it! Advent offers language to interpret our experiences in this season, deepening our understanding of ourselves and our world, all gathered up in the holy anticipation of the arrival of Immanuel, God with us. 

So the practical question remains: how do we experience the fruit of Advent when the world around us is in full Christmastide? The basic principle to guide our thinking is that the seasonal markers of holiday fun don’t have to detract from Advent hope. We don’t need to chide people for getting excited about Christmas during Advent. Go ahead and put up your tree and hang the stockings if you’d like. The question, as it almost always is in Christian life, is, “What sort of effect does this practice have on me? What does this foster in my heart, mind, and interactions with others? What does it point me toward?” 

Our faith gives us the resources to make sense of the longing for Christmas all around us and to create practices that will help us make good use of this holy time. What might those practices be for you? Are there ways in which we can gather up this hectic time and offer it to God with Advent hope?