It’s barely past Halloween, why the Christmas decorations and music?

I’ve been reading articles and watching spots most of my life lamenting the earliness of Christmas-ish stuff every year. It doesn’t just seem as if the pre-Christmas shopping season has gobbled-up all dates and times preceding it. The shopping season has done exactly that.

In the foggy early reaches of my growing memory, I recall days before there was a Black Friday shopping spree. The phenomenon appeared in the 1980s. I’m quite certain there was consternation in the decades before 1980 over the encroaching commercialization of Christmas. Those earlier and earlier mercantile sales dates scheduled on their way toward Black Friday weren’t welcome then either.

We, Christians, habitually grouse about symptoms. It’s as if symptomatic abatement cures the underlying illness. See my articles about fathers and the children’s future attendance here, here, here, and here. Christmas cheer getting sucked up before “the holidays” is a symptom, not the illness.

The illness is this: we are seeing civic festivals and pagan consumerism crossing the boundaries into the life of the church. Instead, let’s reset those boundaries, and get our minds around the days of the church. Dear Christians, we are to be in the world, but not of it.

Halloween, Thanksgiving, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day are not church festivals.

Halloween falls on the official church day of All Hallows Eve, October thirty-first. Lutherans more commonly celebrate Reformation Day on the same day, commemorating Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg castle church, sparking the reformation.

All Saints’ Day is November First. Christians will often observe All Hallows Eve/Reformation and All Saints’ Day by shifting the former back and/or the latter forward to the nearest Sunday. Both days fall within the season of Trinity (Pentecost on the Pope’s lectionary) just ahead of the end of the church year.

Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November and can fall between November twenty-second and twenty-eighth. That makes for seven variable relationships between Thanksgiving and Christmas, between twenty-seven and thirty-three days apart. 2023 will be an infrequent occasion with Thanksgiving falling before the last Sunday of the church year. However, Thanksgiving is still always before the beginning of the new church year.

The pagan world would have us believe all of those holidays are part of the Christmas season. They are not. Those days and commemorations are not even in the same church year as the seasons of Advent of Christmas, which follow them.

The church year ends with the last Sunday of the church year and the week following it. The day can also be called Ultima Sunday, after the last syllable of a Koine Greek word, or Christ the King Sunday, commemorating Jesus’s second Advent at the end of days. The last Sunday of the church year is always the fifth Sunday before Christmas Day.

After the first two civic holidays, the church year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, always the fourth Sunday before Christmas. Advent can consist of between twenty-two and twenty-eight days. It begins between November twenty-seventh and December third. And, Advent contains three or four Wednesdays. The three Wednesdays are slightly more common, occurring in four of the seven variations, excluding Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is a day of Advent. It is not typically celebrated as a Wednesday of Advent, when falling on Wednesday.

This means that those cute, premade, every-year advent calendars are seldom actually right. It’s a lot of fun to open the doors for the little prizes. But, Advent rarely has exactly twenty-four days.

Like the Advent Calendars, Christians used to decorate progressively. By adding a bit each week heading into Christmas, it adds to the excitement of preparation for the incarnation of Our Lord. This is opposite of the Christmas fatigue caused by all decorations going up the day after Halloween or Thanksgiving, before Advent even started.

The twelve days of the Christmas feast begin on December 25. They can contain two Sundays, but more commonly just one. The days of Christmas are December twenty-fifth through January fifth. On December twenty-sixth, we also celebrate the feast of St. Stephen, the first martyr. We celebrate the feast of St. John, the only apostle to die a natural death, on December twenty-seventh. December twenty-eighth marks the feast of the Holy Innocents, killed by Herod upon the magi’s visit to Bethlehem. The celebration of the Circumcision and Naming of Jesus on January first is also a named feast within the twelve days. Christmas ends on Twelfth Night, preceding the Epiphany of Our Lord. The latter of which is celebrated on January 6.

It is suitable for Christians to decorate and sing seasonal hymns beginning on Christmas Eve. In decades past, we would have it no other way. Now, it may be impossible to forego all of the civic festivities around us. But, we should at least save the bulk of our revelry for the actual celebration of the incarnation of our Lord. We should not allow the pagan world to suck all of our Christmas cheer before we’ve even begun the Christmas feast.

This year and in years to come, spend some time in thought and prayer concerning the harrowing of the End of Days, the preparation of our hearts in Advent, and the joyous gift of Christmas (the whole season of Christmas). There’s more to it than the Christmas shopping season. Our Lord took on human flesh, being born in lowliest state to bear our sins and be our Savior! Beyond just thought and prayer, avail yourself of the Lord’s house, receiving His gifts of the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation for you.

Blessèd Advent preparation!

Rev. Jason M. Kaspar
Sole Pastor
Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church & Preschool
La Grange, TX
and
Mission planting pastoral team:
Epiphany Lutheran Church
Bastrop, TX

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