What ever happened to Advent?
Joseph Bottum has a piece in the most recent issue of First Things on the disappearance of Advent. Here is how it begins (you need a subscription to read the rest of it):
“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.”
When I was growing up, we didn’t trim the Christmas tree until Christmas Eve, and that held in my siblings’ families until fairly recently. I won’t talk about the advertising on TV and in stores, which this year began early in November, nor about the incessant playing of Christmas music, except to note that I know of at least one pastor who was berated by a parishioner because during what used to be celebrated as Advent, no Christmas carols were being sung at Mass! A few years ago I heard a news-anchor refer to the Twelve Days of Christmas as the last shopping days before Christmas!
Advent is alive and well at our house, and is one of our favorite times of year!
We do the candles, the Advent prayers, and everybody gets a teensy piece of chocolate after supper.
We spend Advent clearing the house of things we no longer need that could be donated or pitched, and we used to pick a special book to read aloud until my son announced he was too old to have his parents read to him.
This year, I gave him a copy of “The Bronze Bow,” a book I remember reading in grade school about a Jewish boy who comes to know Jesus, that I thought he might like.
Years ago, we stopped buying presents for Christmas. I usually spend Advent knitting everybody a pair of slippers or a new stocking cap. The pattern corresponds to the rosary, so everybody gets a rosary knitted right into the gift whether they know it or not!
My son often draws us a special cartoon and leaves it under the coffee urn every day of the REAL 12 days of Christmas.
American holiday are commercial events, occasions for buying things, some for use and some for display. They are found throughout the year, conveniently spaced. Advent is superfluous, commercially speaking, because it is too close to Christmas. Thanksgiving is the lead in to the Christmas Shopping Season–or Holiday Shopping Season–which starts on the day after. (Those of a certain age will remember when Thahksgiving was the last Thursday in November, and that it was moved to the fourth Thursday lest the Shopping Season not be long enough.)
If Christians won’t keep their holy days sacred, there is absolutely no way that secular society will do it for them.
About the only vestige of Advent observance in most Catholic parishes is the Advent wreath with the odd hymn or 2. Explanations as to why …… haven’t heard one in years.
I was interviewed for an article on this topic a couple of years ago: http://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2005/05648.htm
The good part of the cultural phenomenon is that Catholics can buy Christmas treats at half off, on the Feast of Stephen.
I actually think things are getting better in this regard. It used to be much more common that liturgists had to fight hard to keep Advent hymns and Advent decorations in churches, and now it’s much better established. People love the quiet atmosphere of Advent. It’s a refuge from commercial assaults. I’ve even seen some movement toward putting Christmas parties and Christmas concerts AFTER Christmas, so there’s not so much let-down after Christmas day. Obviously Advent does not occur in the shopping mall, but for many Catholic parishes and households it’s a beloved season.
I’ve been saying for years that June would be a much better time for Christmas. Far less competition with the other holidays.
Under Fr. Martin’s proposal, that would place Advent, er, New Advent, in May.
I don’t know about anyone else, but that’s a busy month for me. Cinco de Mayo…Mother’s Day…All those college graduations to attend…The finale shows of the TV season…Gardens to plant, and yardwork galore as April showers become May flowers. I can already feel my calendar overflowing and the pressure building.
Christmas in June? Sorry, no can do. ;)
I don’t think changing the date will work; the hucksters will simply chase it around the calendar.
You just have to have the will to say, “That’s not how we do Christmas.”
I loathe and despise the secularized Christmas season with all my heart. As a child gift-giving and tree decorating were turned into competitive sports. There was no religious or even spirtual aspect whatever. Everybody seemed to hate it, but no one seemed able to stop it.
When my son was four, he made Lego ornaments for our tree and stuck them on with duct tape. He thought they were absolutely beautiful–the red and green of the legos and the shiny silver of the tape–and he wanted to share them with us.
That was my epiphany–Christmas is what you do, not what it looks like.
It’s been very hard, and feelings have been hurt, but since then, I’ve told family and friends that we don’t do secular Christmas anymore. I’ve been somewhat more sane ever since.
Just found this quote:
“Abundance (as Daniel Bell once observed) may be the American substitute for socialism; but as shared social objectives go, shopping remains something of an underachievement. In the early years of the French Revolution the Marquis de Condorcet was dismayed at the prospect of commercial society that was opening before him (as it is opening before us): the idea that “liberty will be no more, in the eyes of an avid nation, than a necessary condition for the security of financial operations.” We ought to share his revulsion.”
The truth is, many of us don’t really like people when they are left to their own devices, and many of us don’t like the reality of the fact that many people find a mall more inspiring than a church. No matter what they say.
Having never before lived through a popular war, I was astonished by the evident excitement surrounding the first Gulf War. Our troops and tanks were moving forward, crushing the opposition on CNN. It all went well and Powell and Schwarzkopf were heroes. I’m sure there were contrary voices, but overall from where I sat it was a popular war and a positive, shared, American experience.
The popularity of the early Christmas–while I agree in part with Jean that it is dollar-driven–is also, in my view, driven by the desire for shared experience. If you don’t have a championship team in your town, or a presidential frontrunner, or an enjoyable and challenging work environment, at least you have the holiday season.
Moreover, you have the music of the holiday season. How often are Americans allowed to sing in public? Since Whitney Houston made the National Anthem a hit single, we’re reduced now to 1. Happy Birthday to You and 2. Take Me Out to the Ballgame. Two songs that we’re allowed to sing together , that’s it. No drinking songs, no regional soccer songs, nothing to compare to the Korean song “Arirang” or any of the Welsh songs that perennially run around stadiums like The Wave used to do in 90s America.
“We are the world.” Great idea, but dated, and there’s no current substitute.
Americans have nothing in common but Christmas time. TV even changes! It’s our only special season apart from reruns in summer and Monday Night Football. The current that redirects Advent is our need for a shared experience. And that undertow can’t compete with our best liturgical intentions.
Great quote from C. Ratzinger (B16) in Co-Workers of the Truth:
“Nowadays a theologian or preacher is all but expected to heap more or less sarcastic criticism on our popular way of celebrating Christmas and thus to contrast impressively the touching sentimentality of our celebration with the stark reality of the first Christmas. Christmas, we are told, has been commercialized irredeemably and has degenerated into a sensless marketing frenzy; its religiousity has become tacky. Of course, such criticism is largely justified, even though it might too readily forget that behind the facade of business and sentimentality the yearning for something purer and greater is not entirely extinguished, indeed, that the sentimental framework often provides the protecting shield behind which hides a noble and genuine sentiment that is simlpy reluctant to expose itself to the gaze of the other. The hectic commercialism is repugnant to us, and rightly so…. And yet, underneath it all, does it not originate in the notion of giving and thus in the inner urgency of love, with its compulsion to share, to give of oneself to the other?”
Before we move Christmas into June, as James Martin suggests, we’d better realize that a few miles north of where I live (in Vermont), many people take very seriously the Feast of St.- Jean-Baptiste (June 24, of course — as they also took Johannistag very seriously in Nuremberg at the time of Hans Sachs and his friends (at least if you believe Wagner).
Here’s another suggestion. Christians should keep Christmas in December — its link to the winter solstice remains symbolically important. However, to show solidarity with their more secular fellows, they should also insist that in the interests of honoring the First Amendment (or, more properly, recent interpretations of that document), Christmas must not be a state holiday. (I’m sure we could enlist Christopher Hitchens and the lawyers of the ACLU and such in this worthy effort.) So on December 25, everyone goes to work as usual. Unless, of course, it falls on a Sunday — but perhaps we should do away with that too. That would return it as a Christian feast immediately, for those who go to church on Christmas go on their own time, much as they do on, say, Ascension Day or Epiphany.
Did I say Epiphany? What’s Epiphany, anyway? When I was young, January 1, the Feast of the Circumcision was a day of obligation. Today, January 1, the Feast of Mary Mother of God, is a day of obligation. Does that mean it matters more to have January 1 a day of obligation than to worry which feast it might happen to be? Meanwhile, at least in the US Catholic church, no one paid much attention to poor old Epiphany, and now it’s become the nearest convenient Sunday to January 6, thus going the way of, in the secular sphere, Columbus Day and such. Could that cavalier disregard for the timing of an ancient major feast (to say nothing of the commemoration of the Twelve Days of Christmas) have anything to do with the fading of Advent that Fr. Komonchak rightly regrets?
As for Advent hymns, perhaps some day we’ll learn that there is — even in the flimsy little missalette — more to Advent music than “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” which we get every Sunday, over and over and over, perhaps both as pro- and re-cessional.
Such as “Sleepers Wake” — Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. But who’s listening?
I love “Wachet auf . . .” I think it’s one of the greatest songs ever written and my church sings it at least once during every advent, along with the French inspired “People Look East,” which I also look forward to singing.
I can do without People Look East, which seems much more like a stuffing commercial than an Advent hymn (“even the hour when wings are frozen/ he for fledgling time has chosen.”) In its place I’d suggest the equally French, equally waltzable O Come, Divine Messiah.
Or, in a Germanic mode, Comfort, Comfort, Ye My People.
Of the translations of Wachet Auf, I prefer Christopher Idle’s loose translation Wake O Wake and Sleep No Longer. The unusual rhyme scheme is largely, deliberately imperfect (in keeping with the theme of waiting) and there are liturgical hints dropped in each verse, referring to the Mass: “Alleluia” “Sing Hosannah” “Amen.” So it’s the realized, divine liturgy breaking in upon our Advent waiting–not bad!!
I would suggest is that Christma-holics, who overdo the buying, cooking, decorating, and watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” over and over, may be trying to get accolades or love from those they feel don’t appreciate them at any other time.
I’m not much on warm fuzzy shared experiences, group singing and the like. But maybe spreading the love and appreciation around the year would help.
It could prevent you from getting sucked into the vortex of Christmas Frenzy and then getting called up all through January with complaints about what a let-down the holiday was this year.
I know, “People Look East” is schmaltzy, mostly because of the lyrics. But I really love the French hymn tradition even more than the German, first and foremost, the work of Charpentier. A less schmaltzy French tune is the one that accompanies “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” which isn’t really Advent focused, but can be done in a really stunning round with “O Come O Come Emmanuel.”
Add my vote for more of “Wachet auf.” A glorious song. When Nicholas Clifford mentioned it earlier in this thread, I pulled out the CD version I had closest at hand and was transported to the boundary between earth and heaven. (O.K., I’m exaggerating, but not by much.)
Barbara,
Ah, Picardy (Let All Mortal Flesh).
Thanks for pointing to Charpentier. Your comment led me to this wonderland website: http://www.charpentier.culture.fr
A current liturgical composer to watch is the French Dominican Andre Gouze.
However, speaking personally, I went to Cologne last year at Christmas just to hear the German hymns, with their shifting rhythms and bounding leaps. (Of course it was the kinder, gentler Rhineland German.)