Once upon a time, kids had to wait a whole year for The Wizard of Oz to air on TV; now you can pop in a DVD of any show you want any time. Books show up on our Kindles in an instant, as do songs on our iPods. Churches can be different, inviting people to wait and hope, both as a spiritual discipline and also as a recognition of what psychologists are learning about human happiness. Happy people wring as much positive emotion from experiences as possible by spending time anticipating them.
Easier said than done, of course. “The desire to open Christmas presents early is very strong, even for adults,” Kathleen Pluth says. But ideally, Advent services can make people revel in the joy of anticipation ”” of singing Joy to the World in a few weeks’ time.
Oh I don’t know, I’ve never had the urge to rip open my presents before Christmas morning. 😉
I like to be surprised, and I enjoy the anticipation in waiting for Christmas to arrive…although my neighbors think I’m weird because we have a simple purple wreath on the front door and no Christmas decorations (yet).
I can totally identify. I used to think the waiting was going to make me explode before the big day. But now I love how singing Advent, rather than prematurely singing Christmas, hymns and doing all the preparatory things help to build the anticipation.
It seems to me there is a difference between church and home. The Church has its calendar, and I appreciate that but I know when my children were small we sneaked in a few carols before Christmas Eve. I don’t think it altered the fabric of the universe very much. And I have been listening to Sirrius channel 4 since Thanksgiving with lots of Christmas songs. I have learned one thing, though. Apparently anyone who can remotely sing has cut a version of “Blue Christmas”. It is actually annoying how many versions of that song there are!
Laura Vanderkam makes some good point but miss and very important point: many evangelical churches Advent, or any church holy day, is a foreign concept. I can testify as one who was a member of evangelical/ fundamentalist church both small and mega. Advent, if at all, was something tacked on to the service as a brief mention. I never heard any emphasis on advent until I left the Baptist church and back to my Anglican roots.
I have always tried to make the distinction between the Christmas Season (begins on Dec 24 and ends on Epiphany) which celebrates the Birth of Our Lord and the “Holiday Season” which begins on Thanksgiving day (specifically when Santa appears in the Macy’s Parade!!) and ends on December 25 or so.
Christmas Songs are “Angels we have heard on high”, “Silent Night”, “The First Noel” etc.
Holiday Songs are “Jingle Bells”, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman etc.
So, I have always taken part in the “Holiday celebrations” starting on Thanksgiving but waited until Christmas Eve to celebrate “Christmas.”
#5–Excellent point. You said what I meant (though I think we may have sung Silent Night or the First Noel in the car 20 years ago).
Of course, Christmas itself, that is, the Incarnation, has already taken place in the fulness of time and cannot be repeated. So we could (and do!) commemorate and celebrate His coming to us as Emmanuel all year long, and so could theoretically sing Christmas carols all year long! 😉 I have heard Adeste Fideles excerpts sung several times during the year at Nashville First Nazarene Church, for example.
Personally, I always was and still am into sneaking open Christmas presents at the earliest possible moment. But that’s mainly because the “anticipation” being built up for me around Christmas never had all that much to do with presents.
My mother bought and decorated our tree on Christmas Eve mainly because that’s when they were on sale. My Christmas presents always included a beautiful new dress. (That wasn’t a big surprise because I had to try it on first.) We would open one present on Christmas Eve and then go to Midnight Mass. The REAL Midnight Mass not the “kiddie” version everybody goes to at 6 pm now. Just being up at 1 am was a thrilling event. The church would be ablaze in candles — one candle at the end of every pew as well as all over the sanctuary. I would be wearing my new dress. The priest would be wearing white and gold vestments proceeding in at the head of a long procession including the full men and women’ choirs in robes. The organ and the hundreds of voices shook the church. The incense wafted around our heads. The sanctus bell rang out at the moment of consecration. Who could doubt that something awesome was happening? That once again, at the very stroke of 12, heaven would be wedded to earth? It was magical (in the figurative sense) beyond belief. Getting a new doll or what have you the next day wasn’t even in the same ballpark.
Ok, ok, I do admit to singing “Away in a Manger” and “Silent Night” to my almost 3 year old every night for the last week or so, but then he’s going to be singing them with the rest of the children at the Family Mass on Christmas Eve, so I want him to be familiar with them.
The battle is lost and we look silly anticipating the birth of the Christ child by avoiding anything referring to the event. By the time we get around to the carols, everyone is sick of them. It makes Chirstianity seem even more unreal. I like the traditional concept but it no longer wokrs. But we are not interested in what works. IMHO