On the first Sunday of Advent, in place of green, priests celebrating the Mass don vestments of violet, the color of penance, and the Gloria is not said. In this respect, Advent resembles Lent: just as we do penance as we await the liturgical celebration of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, so we do as we await his birth.
Nevertheless, Advent is a carefully calibrated penitential season. Whereas there is no gloria, there is an Alleluia.
Advent has not, historically, usually been regarded as requiring the same degree of penance as Lent. A penitential season leading up to Christmas enters the Church’s historical record in France in the year 480, with fasting three days a week from St. Martin’s Day (November 11), but as it spread to other countries, it became shorter and less severe.
All the same, it is a penitential season, and if Christmas has overtaken Easter as the primary season of gluttony, we should prepare spiritually for it with all the greater care.
It is characteristic of the Catholic spirit to make the year a patchwork of joy and penance. Every Sunday is a day of celebration; every Friday should include a taste of sorrow. The greatest feasts are or have historically been preceded by days or seasons of penitential preparation and followed by a week or longer of celebration. It makes life more interesting; it gives us something to look forward to; it gives us opportunities for celebrations we would not otherwise have. It should also stimulate us to penitential practices, which are certainly good for our health but are not the life sentence of modern calorie-counting puritanism. Gaining control of our eating and drinking—mortifying our appetites, in the traditional terminology—is good in itself, and by giving up the good things of food and drink, we offer something worthwhile to God.
Penance before and an ongoing celebration after a great feast also afford us an opportunity for an extended, deeper consideration of the mystery. In the liturgy, we hear about the events leading up to Christmas, and prophecies of it from the Old Testament. After Christmas, there is a series of episodes from the scriptures that are marked liturgically, which deepen our appreciation of the Christmas mystery. This is particularly valuable when they take us in surprising directions, as do the Holy Innocents on December 28, martyred out of hatred for Christ, and St. Stephen the Protomartyr on the 26th. God’s coming as a human baby is not welcomed by everyone: it is a divisive event.
We are faced with a practical problem in the modern world, however. Christianity has left its mark on the secular calendar, but the secular world uses our seasons and feasts in a peculiar way. Lent seems to have been designated a chocolate-eating season. Even harder to ignore is the way Advent, which seems to begin now with Thanksgiving’s accidental offspring, Black Friday (even, I am ashamed to say, in the U.K.), has become an extended celebration of consumerism and self-indulgence.
Buying presents in Advent makes sense, since that is part of the preparation for Christmas. What is strange is the tendency for Christmas celebrations to take place in advance of Christmas, from office parties to fun fairs and children’s theatrical offerings. For many people, Christmas Day is at once the high point and also the end of Christmas. We may be able to extend the party spirit until the New Year, the Octave Day of Christmas, which is marked by its own major feast (variously called the Circumcision; the Holy Name of Jesus; and the feast of Mary, Mother of God). But the historic Twelve Days of Christmas takes us up to the Epiphany, a renewed celebration of the mystery of the Incarnation. Then again, the season of Christmas, during which we continue to sing the beautiful Marian anthem Alma Redemptoris Mater (as we should have been singing it through Advent as well), traditionally extends even further, to a final major liturgical visit to the young Holy Family: Candlemas, the feast of the Purification, on February 2. Yes, February.
In the meantime, the secular world has plunged itself into its own penitential season: “Dry January,” the season of new gym memberships and New Year’s resolutions. The Northern Hemisphere’s New Year is a terrible time to take up running before breakfast, of course, or anything else improving and arduous, and it is hardly surprising that such resolutions usually come to nothing. (Why not try such things for Lent, in the early spring, with added supernatural motivation, and see if you can keep it going afterward?)
On the one hand, the commercial imperative links buying things with celebration, and on the other hand, having done this for well over a month, by the time Christmas Day finally comes round, people need to get back to normal, and indeed to lose some of the weight they gained from anticipatory mince pies and mulled wine in December. We can go back to partying with Mardi Gras, now extended from the original Shrove (or Fat) Tuesday to practically the whole of Lent, before we all need to get thin for the beach, and so the joyless penance of dieting can be begin again at Easter.
I don’t think this has come about due to an anti-Christian conspiracy, but if it had been, it would have been a clever one: a complete inversion of the Church’s liturgical seasons.
When the world wants us to feast when we should be fasting, and fast when we should be feasting, we are at least reminded that we are not of this world. “Amen, amen I say to you, that you shall lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice; and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy” (John 6:20).
In the practical circumstances of family life, it is difficult to embrace such a counter-cultural stance without a supportive and close-knit community, which most of us do not have. It is important, all the same, if we are to maintain Christmas as a joyful time, and not an anti-climax, at least to keep something back during Advent, in order to mark the transition from waiting and anticipating to actually celebrating. The domestic crib (nativity) scene is useful in this regard, with the empty manger waiting for the baby Jesus until Christmas, and the shepherds and wise men arriving in stages thereafter. This is also the message of the liturgical year: our waiting is turned to joy, and this message of joy is spread gradually to a wider and wider circle.
At the Purification, we are told of the prophetess Anna: “Now she, at the same hour, coming in, confessed to the Lord; and spoke of him to all that looked for the redemption of Israel” (Luke 2:38). The message of Christmas is one of crescendo, which will reach its fulfilment only when he returns in glory.