Christmas season doesn’t end Dec. 25, it starts there
by Deacon Michael Harmon
In no other circumstance do we think that the birth of a baby is the conclusion of its story.
A month or so ago, my wife suggested we not put up a Christmas tree this year.
I agreed with her rationale: With two newly adopted (and highly rambunctious) kittens in the house, it would only become a jungle gym for a pair of playful pussycats, who already are doing quite enough interior redesign on their own without giving them new heights to scale (and ornaments to knock to the floor and bat about).
With the kids and their families otherwise occupied for the day, we are having the offspring over a couple of days later.
So, with no pitter-patter (or in our case, thump and thud) of grandchildren’s feet around the house on the day itself, a tree loses much of its meaning as a center of family activity.
Yet, I miss it. Traditions are important, and not having a tree is slightly sad – at least for those of us whose earliest memories of the holiday include the trip to find a suitable candidate and cart it home.
No matter how long you had anticipated it, when the tree was put up and decorated, Christmas was on its way. The tree was both a sign of its incipient arrival and a guarantee that nothing could stop it now.
A boy could look at it and know that the tree skirt covering the stand would in not too many days be covered itself with packages signed “Santa” in a handwriting curiously similar to his mother’s.
But that was many years – and many trees – ago.
No tree this year, though. Instead, there’s a hole in the corner of the family room, a vertical triangular void that didn’t seem empty until the new year rolled around a couple of weeks ago.
No, not the new year coming in a couple of weeks, but the one that began with the first Sunday of Advent on Nov. 29.
We celebrate a longer Christmas than most folks. The outside lights go up according to the seasons of the church year, not the calendar.
They get turned on for the beginning of Advent and stay on until the Twelve Days are done and Epiphany arrives.
That’s the day that recalls when the Magi crossed mountains, rivers and deserts to worship a baby whose real status as a king was revealed to them by a special light in the heavens that guided their way.
After Epiphany, the lights come off the bushes, but the candles in the windows remain lit until Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.
While the dark endures, we like to come home to a house that welcomes us with light, just as a stable shining from within once cheerfully welcomed shepherds who had been watching their flocks in the fields by night.
Celebrating Advent – an anticipation of the arrival of the Messiah that looks both back into the past and forward to the future (he is the Once and Future King, after all) is a meaningful counterweight to the other Christmas that surrounds us now.
It is often full of joy (as well as stress) but it is limited by both beginning and ending too early.
It sometimes seems as though we are conditioned to see Dec. 25 as the culmination of a season that began many weeks ago – and seemingly earlier each year, certainly preceding Halloween now.
I’m not complaining – that people are inspired to buy each other gifts is not a bad thing by any means, as long as they are given to please others.
The season inspires manifold works of charity and provision, and anything that takes us out of ourselves and focuses us on the needs of others cannot be a bad thing, even if it is subject to excess (or even excessively excessive excess) more than once as the weeks wind down toward the holiday itself.
But there’s a way to look at Christmas not as the finale of a long and tiring process – a day that ends with the need to put away all the decorations, throw out the wrapping paper and cartons, and get on with planning a New Year’s Eve party – and see it for what it is: a beginning, not an end.
That’s why my wife and I hold to an older pattern of celebration, one that says Christmas isn’t one day, but 12 – and it has a precursor, Advent.
True, if you’ve been celebrating Christmas for two months by the time the day arrives, that could seem like trying to stretch one eternity into two, and who would want to do that?
No one, and that’s why Advent has always seemed to be a good idea. It has its own traditions – Advent wreaths with candles to light on Sundays, little calendars with doors that open for every day until Christmas – that stir anticipation without making it seem as if the celebration has to start the day the first red-and-green decorations go up in the stores.
Celebrating Advent means that when Christmas comes, it hasn’t been around too long – or at all, actually. So it’s easier to see it as a starting gate and not an finish line.
In the end, trees are optional, not essential. The essential truth is this: What is a birth but a beginning? That is why the other seasons of the church year follow the growth of this baby into manhood, and lead to studying his life and teachings in comprehensive ways.
Babies are nothing if not full of potential. The wonder of their birth is a foretaste of your continuing wonder about the paths their lives will take.
I use a book that has prayers called “collects” for each Sunday of the year. The one for Epiphany says, “Oh God, by the leading of a star you manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face.”
Not an end, but a beginning: Merry Christmas.
M.D. Harmon is an editorial writer for the Portland Press Herald, and he is a Deacon serving at Prince of Peace CEC in Sanford, ME. He can be contacted at: mharmon@pressherald.com
