Sometime in early autumn each year, I begin staging a mock protest against premature Christmas. In this, I am in good company, including seasonally-minded people in general and liturgical christians in particular.
However, every year, even as I bemoan and bewail the manifold indignities of Christmas store displays ere Halloween has come and gone, I cave to the pressures of preparedness and begin — as is culturally normative — readying the house for the coming holidays well in advance.
Advent is intended as a season of fasting and penitence in preparation for the once and future coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ. There are many a thin-lipped legalist who will insist that it is a veritable crime for a stray sprig of boxwood or branch of yew, for the tiniest glass bauble or twinkling light to be brought out before the eve of Christmas. Which is, frankly, just a bit mad.
It also seems to be the especial custom of clergy, who appear to measure their seasonal righteousness in how long they can keep their houses spare and how hurriedly they can erect a few bedraggled, slipshod decorations between Christmas Eve services. There’s a whiff of old money puritanism about that habit, one which culturally assumes that that’s what the help’s for.
Even though few clerics can afford help these days, there is a lingering residue of earlier class assumptions intertwined — perhaps, unconsciously — in this insistence that everything will be done on the spot the day before. It may not be done well, but at least we waited.
It is, ironically, a self-fulfilling prophecy that so many clergy are so mentally and physically wasted by Christmas. Their plaints of exhaustion and enervation rising like a chorus on St. Stephen’s Day, while Christmas is still in full swing and the rest of us are still celebrating.
I reserve my sympathy for unavoidable, involuntary pains — rather than an excess of the choicest, most luxuriant cuts of rigidity and self-righteousness causing oh-so predictable indigestion and lethargy.
I’ll put it squarely, Advent deserves observation, but the attention we give to preparing for Christmas itself is not — in any ordinary person’s life — a slur upon it. And, to make that case, I’d like to visit a few destinations along the road of this rich history of ours.
In fact, I’d have written this earlier in Advent had I not been so overwhelmingly engaged in seasonal aberrations. Endless rehearsals for my sons’ seven performances of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. It took me roughly two weeks to harvest and string together and hang all of the greenery both inside and out for the lintels of the doors and windows.
As someone who has plenty of everyday obligations that are not suspended suddenly in December, there’s absolutely no way I could single-handedly accomplish what I do in preparation for Christmas in one evening. And that’s rather more or less to be expected, I think.
In the last half century and especially in the last decade, Americans work longer and longer hours with fewer and fewer benefits to tread water financially and barely keep pace with costs. Comparatively, in the medieval culture that gave us what we now call Advent, leisure in winter months was at an all time high.
European agricultural societies had lengthy slack periods until the modern era, when things do not grow, livestock are housed rather than herded, and there is simply far less work to do. Many of our fondest traditional Christmas dishes were primarily a means of preservation after harvesting fields and culling herds before winter.
But for people so thoroughly obsessed with what might be called a pageantry of archaisms — that is, christian liturgy — so many Advent purists have little or no relationship to the kind of society and culture within which these customs developed. And had they a better familiarity with that world and its ways, they might, in fact, see their own attitudes as aberrant and ahistoric.
There’s a ripe presentism in the theologically and biblically adept when they make unconditional calls, like would-be Old Testament prophets, for a season bereft of any kind of rejoicing. Crying out that any glimpse of festiveness or merriment before the coming of the Messiah is grossly premature, that we should do everything to strip our lives bare and repent.
That’s all well and good for people who live their lives in proximity to parking lot tree stands, cold storage facilities, domestic refrigeration, produce trucked in from the always sunny, chemically fertile fields of Hoover Dam fed California. You can stick to your guns about what is and isn’t appropriate when you have never known anything but the lush interior of a world of access independent of time and place.
Unlike the world that gave us Advent, that strung together readings that strikingly combined with the realities of living in the wake of harvest and the coming of the front. Preparing food and fuel stores, engaging in salting and fermenting and smoking. Sealing salted meats in impenetrable coffins of pastry, boiling fruits in flour and fruit concoctions that would last through the season and beyond.
There was a bitter reality in both the need to consume that which would spoil and do one’s damnedest to preserve and ration what was left. These were lives intimately and acutely aware of the fragility of every kind of joy, how quickly feasting was succeeded by rationing and fasting and scarcity. They did not need a silly performative act of bombast reminding them of the barrenness of the season.
They were stripped bare by a reality that none of our Advent purists, that not even our poorest poor, will ever know.
It is worth dwelling, then, on what the liturgical tradition itself actually prescribes, which turns out to be considerably less austere than its strictest advocates maintain. The third Sunday of Advent — Gaudete Sunday, named for the opening word of its introit, meaning rejoice — interrupts the purple vestments with rose, relaxes the fast, and invites the congregation toward an anticipatory gladness that the season’s framers understood as entirely compatible with the waiting that preceded it. This is not a concession or an anomaly; it is structural evidence that the tradition has always understood anticipation and joy as continuous rather than sequential states.
Of equal interest is what the English called Stir-up Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent, named not formally but popularly from the collect for that day in the Sarum rite and the Book of Common Prayer, which opens with the words “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people.” Every cook who heard that collect understood it as a practical instruction to begin stirring the Christmas pudding, which required a minimum of four weeks to mature.
The liturgy and the larder shared a language, because the framers of the church calendar had built it from and for an agricultural world, and they understood that preparation for a feast was itself a form of participation in it.
The O Antiphons, those great antiphons of longing that have given us “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” sung at Vespers from the seventeenth through the twenty-third of December, are the season’s climax and its most concentrated expression, and there is nothing spare or withheld about them. They are elaborate and aching and suffused with what they are not yet permitted to name directly.
Anticipation taken to its furthest extreme has always, in that tradition, been already a kind of arrival.
What all of this amounts to is simply this: the stark severance of Advent from Christmas, the rigid insistence on treating the preparation as wholly unlike the thing prepared for, is not the tradition; it is a modern counter-reaction to commercial excess that has been mistaken, with some confidence, for historical orthodoxy. The tradition was always messier, more continuous, more humanely accommodated to the realities of what a winter actually demanded.
The greenery on my lintels and my sons in their Nutcracker costumes and my canning jars remaining, this year, entirely empty because California and cold storage have together rendered them superfluous — these are not a betrayal of the season. They are what the season has always looked like, in the hands of people who had actual households to run.
The medieval parishioner was not stripped bare of festiveness so that we might later perform austerity from the safe remove of central heating and a well-stocked refrigerator. He fasted because the food ran low, and he feasted because it would run low again, and his Advent and his Christmas alike were continuous with his life in the way that all of winter was continuous — one long season of labor and preservation and occasional, hard-won merriment.
Those who are waiting on Christmas Eve to erect their bedraggled sprigs of greenery, congratulating themselves on a season observed in its proper liturgical order, are engaged in a kind of theater that the medieval winter would have found baffling and a little wasteful. Privation performed by those who have never been deprived of anything is not penitence; it is a costume. And it is one that tends to look rather more comfortable on those accustomed to the assumption that someone else will do the actual work of making the house ready.
The help, I am afraid, is unlikely to come and all you’ve really done with your period of preparation is arrive at its end unprepared.