Advent starts on a Sunday. Every year. Christmas may not be a moveable feast* (unlike Easter, which is always the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, which, in turn, is the full moon after the ecclesiastical spring equinox. Got it? Now go figure it out for yourself.), but the first Sunday of Advent always falls on the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day. So Advent starts in late November, or early December, depending on when December 25th comes in the week. It has nothing to do with the shopping days until Christmas, and everything to do with preparation for Christmas. Spiritual preparation; for the coming of the Christchild. A spiritual celebration, of course, but then the spirit, like the body, also needs refreshing.
We’re a Northern European culture, by and large. “Northern” is an advised term, but if you look at a map, southern France is about on parallel with Maine. Spain, “that fragment nipped off hot/Africa,” is parallel to New England, for the most part. For a Texan, that’s a long way north. Maine is our northernmost contiguous continental point, but much of Europe is north of Maine. The point is not about climate, it’s about seasons, and sunlight.
The place with the truest seasons I ever lived in was St. Louis, Missouri. 4 distinct seasons, each about 3 months long. Here on the Gulf Coast, Fall comes in November, when hurricane season ends and you can expect highs below 80. Finally. That slides into winter, when you can expect highs below 70, until spring starts up in February or, if you’re lucky, March. This is driven, primarily, by daylight. Shorter days mean cooler days, because the sun isn’t up long enough for the heat to truly build.
It’s proximity to Canada, too. The joke in Texas is that there’s nothing between Texas and Canada but a strand of barbed wire. Canada is where the blue northers come from, and on this continent the mountain ranges run north/south, on the eastern and western sides. The plains in the middle leave nothing between Texas and the great white north except distance, and I’ve stepped across the boundary line of a blue norther as far south as Austin. It was like stepping through a freezer door, and no turning back. It would be warmer soon enough, but that’s Texas: even in the winter, no condition lasts long. I lived a year in Chicago, and it took me a year in Texas after to thaw out. Still, such cold as gets here comes largely because of the lesser sunlight of the season.
Which is lesser still in Denver and Chicago in winter (two cities I’m familiar with), because the days are much shorter there (especially Chicago) than they are in Texas. Sunlight and darkness are the features of winter that emphasize the cold. 🥶
Our holidays in America, even in Southern California, even along all the Gulf Coast and southwest, emphasize Northern European experiences. Hallowe’en was a much shorter day and longer night in Chicago than it ever was in my childhood; but the holiday of my childhood was Hallowe’en as I knew it, and that’s all that mattered (don’t get me started on what DST has done to that). Christmas may have celebrated the shortest day of the year, meaning the gradual return of daylight (and yet it never falls on the solstice…🤔), but that’s more the business of northern cultures where winter meant long days of dark. (I’m not overlooking Alaska, which shares proximity to the Arctic Circle with the Nordic countries.) In much of America, winter just means a respite from the heat. And yet our biggest holidays, the ones we look most forward to, are in the winter. No one wants to trick or treat in the glimmering, long evenings of June, before, or even right after, the equinox. No one wants to go to bed early when the sun won’t be down until almost 9, to wait for Santa Claus in his…sleigh? In summer? An empty hay wagon might be more appropriate.
For better or worse, our biggest holidays, our most anticipated holidays, are Northern European ones, and we keep that as our tradition. (I know I’m eliding New Year’s, but that’s a vestigial memory of the 12 Days of Christmas, and it usually marks the end of the Christmas holidays, which once upon a time ran to Jan. 6, and concluded properly with Epiphany. And we’re all the poorer for the loss.) The question of the solstice and Xmas was a live wire a few years ago: “Where did these holidays (less so the customs) come from?” That prompted a lot of armchair, and ignorant, anthropology, something similar to the “scholarship” J.R.R. Tolkien demolished. Or would have, had he published his lecture notes on “Beowulf” during his lifetime. But, alas, he was not a Frenchman in the late 20th-early 21st century, when publishing lecture notes as books became fashionable. That task was left to his third son, in the second decade of this century. Which is to say, 100 years after his father lectured from those notes.
I was taught (I think you’ll still find it used in Seamus Heaney’s translation) that the kenning (metaphor, of a sort; this really isn’t a lecture on Old English poetry) for the sea traveled by the Vikings (Beowulf and Hrothgar, etc. Basically.) was properly translated as “whale road.” Not at all, says Tolkien, because the word translated as “road” in the manuscript sounds like a precursor to our modern word, but it’s no such thing at all. Take my word for it; Tolkien explains it thoroughly, and he knew his stuff. The OE term is closer to “place,” and not at all what “road” connotes to us. Likewise the word translated as “whale” denotes rather a fish the size of a porpoise (which, I know, is a mammal. Calm down.) There is a separate word in OE for “whale” which, ironically, sounds like our modern word. But that’s not the word in the kenning, which actually describes (in whole) the area where the dolphins/porpoises play. The point of the kenning being activity rather than static description. Tolkien’s translation breathes life into what is a stale and passive metaphor, by contrast. Not the road where the whales trundle, but the place where the dolphins sport. 🐬 Their playground, you might say.
Without adequate knowledge, IOW, you can conjecture all manner of error. Like what Xmas Day had to do with the solstice (bugger all). No, the connection between Christmas and America has more to with Europe than anything. We still want to celebrate with food and light and music and noise when the days grow shorter and the nights colder, forcing us indoors and more than ever seeking human company. Just like our ancestor cultures taught us to.
Advent is that kind of preparation. Preparation for the days of Christmas, even if the days are just the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. Even if we don’t have a holiday from work for that week (or from school; I took, and taught, many a course that resumed again on the 26th and wasn’t through until the 2nd). There’s still a sense of time suspended until January 2nd, and a great deal of preparation for the 25th day of the 12th month. Perhaps the wrong kind of preparation.
You expect me to say the “right” kind of preparation for Xmas is spiritual. I won’t say that, because it isn’t true. How you keep Christmas, or how you leave it alone, is up to you, and no matter to me. I’m just trying to provide a guide to a spiritual preparation for the season, if I can. I have no particular expertise. I have an interest, and nothing more. But there are the shopping days between (American) Thanksgiving and December 25th; and there is Advent. One is of the world; the other is of the church (more specifically the Roman Catholic Church, but we’ll emphasize the “catholic” here, since I’m not RC and don’t presume, or pretend, to present an RC point of view, or to even be worthy of a nihil obstat.). I like presenting alternative thoughts when I can.
Makes for more interesting conversations. And we could certainly learn from the dolphins to enjoy ourselves more.
Every year I mean to focus on Advent, and ignore politics. Every year I both fail, and fall back on what I’ve done before. No shame in the latter; who wants December with no familiar sights and sounds and smells? But another attempt at a newer approach couldn’t hurt.
I’ve traditionally done this by posting the lectionary readings for each Sunday of Advent and dealing with them much as I would in a sermon. This year, I’m going to post the scriptures for each Sunday, as usual, but then offer meditations through the week on each selection. Several short, instead of four long and tortured, essays. I want to focus on preparation, rather than Sundays. This will give me a better opportunity to be more deliberate about that. I hope.
There is, if you're interested, another aspect to Advent (I like to keep my options open):
What happened to marriage and family that it should have become a travail and a sadness?...God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God's goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing...What is missing? Where did it go? I won't have it! I won't have it! Why this sadness here? Don't stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you've found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest! Stop, thief! What is missing? God? Find him!
--Walker Percy
"Excita, quaesumus Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni."
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