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Dear Readers,
By now your conscience should be clear of Thanksgiving gorgings. Let this be the first of the Yuletide deliveries to arrive and mark the beginning of the Christmas season. Well, maybe not, since Christmas trees and decorations invaded Wal-Mart even before Halloween.
It seems the end of Advent begins earlier each year. In this festive season celebrating the omnipresence of Christmas, we must wonder how our holy days have turned into holidays. Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale.
Every secularized holiday 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.
We've let this thing get out of hand, using Christ's birthday as an excuse to shop. Instead of Advent we celebrate Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Our sacraments are red-dot sales and blue-light specials. Instead of the Gospels, we read the colorful Sunday ads. We drink up the holiday spirits and wake up with a credit-card hangover.
How can we reclaim Christmas?
Your Fiendly, Neighborhood Apatheist,
~Bill
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