Celebrate Christmas after Christmas, not before
‘Christmas is too profound to be limited to one day of feasting and merriment’
This article features in Bournbrook’s fourteenth print issue, which can be purchased here: https://www.bournbrookmag.com/print-issues/p/christmas-2020 Alternatively, subscribe to Bournbrook here: https://www.bournbrookmag.com/subscribe
Each year as Christmas approaches, I have a competition with myself to see how long I can go without being subjected to cheesy and rather tiresome Christmas music. This year, Wham’s Last Christmas could be heard as early as November 28th and other 'classics' such as Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas have been endured ever since. This premature celebration of Christmas is often coupled with the ill-timed erection of Christmas trees and decorations.
To some extent, you cannot blame secular folk from wanting to embrace Christmas festivities after the annus horribilis COVID-19 has wrought. Yet, celebrating Christmas before time nearly always ends up in an unfortunate saturation with holiday cheer and indulgence; and the most wonderful time of the year ends with a sudden thud on Boxing Day. This is then exasperated by the quasi-penitential character of peculiar phenomena such as Dry January.
In the Christian tradition, Christmas is the time we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and the wonderful mystery of the Incarnation: when God became Man and dwelt amongst us. This great feast is preluded by a sober time of expectant hope and joy in which we prepare ourselves for the coming of the Christ-child. The Church calls this time Advent.
During the four weeks of Advent, the Christian prepares himself not just for Christmas Dinner or for the Queen’s Speech; nor for just a couple of days of religious observance. The celebrations continue and the feast is prolonged during what is called the Octave of Christmas. We can perhaps deduce from its name that an Octave is a period of eight days where the solemnity of the feast is maintained throughout.
Christmas is too profound to be limited to one day of feasting and merriment.
We can partially understand why the world is so miserable when we contemplate the gravity of its anti-Christian orientation. There is so much unavoidable anticipation for just one day.
In the absence of faith and a cultural appreciation for Christian tradition, Christmas has morphed into a deformed commercial product that ordinary people are coerced buying into. Its Christian value has been stripped away and replaced with a secular alternative. Thus, we see the obsession with material things and a growing tendency for immediate gratification and personal gain.
These are the symptoms of a people ignorant of love of neighbour and blinded by individualism.
An appropriate remedy against the wiles of the world is to refuse to surrender to the secular approach that celebrates Christmas before Christmas and not afterward. Indulgence and excess in November and December make the cold and miserable days of January all the more depressing when we are guilted into dieting and teetotalism.
Instead, it is far better to make a real effort — in the way our homes are decorated, the way we spend time with our families, and the other activities we do in the house — to keep an authentic spirit of Christmas alive, even if at a 'low burn' through January culminating with Candlemass on February 2nd. To participate in such an observance is to participate in a counter-cultural catechesis on one of the central tenets of Christianity. This is a subtle yet profound rejection of the modern, secular world and an embrace of comprehensive tradition.
Conservatism wishes to embrace all that is good about a place and a people. Christmas, then, is a time to rediscover our Christian heritage and re-posses it as something Good. Only then we can restore all things in Christ.
It might be worth doing after the year we’ve all had.
