Defeat the Christmas Blues: Celebrate Advent

The first of the countless articles on how difficult Christmas is has already appeared: “Christmas Blues: The Impact of Finances, Loneliness, and Stress During the Holiday Season” tells us what we’ll be reading about in the title. There’s much truth in such articles. But what they often leave out is that there is a good way to alleviate all that schedule and finance strain, as well as the loneliness. It’s by refusing the siren song (or is it Mariah Carey?) of modern Christmas celebration that tells us we must be partying the entire month. Instead, we should celebrate Advent. There’s no better time to start that practice than today—the first official day of Advent on western Christian calendars.

Advent is the season of preparation for Christmas. It starts with the fourth Sunday before Christmas. And it is often ignored, even among Christians who have it on their calendars. Christmas sales and retail Christmas displays have been up since before Halloween. Pop radio stations have started their Christmas play list, the HOAs and even many Americans have already put up their trees and decorations. And Christmas parties and even Christmas concerts often happen even before that first day of the preparatory season.

It was not always so. In many Christian cultures, the putting up of decorations and the singing of Christmas Carols proper was reserved for, well, Christmas—a season that lasts from December 25 until, depending on how you consider it, Epiphany twelve days later or even Candlemas on February 2. In our house, influenced by German Catholic traditions on my wife’s side, we bring in the tree and decorate it on Christmas Eve or, if we’re getting wild and crazy, Christmas Adam—a joking way to describe December 23, which precedes Christmas Eve. And though there might have been parties to celebrate St. Nicholas (the real Santa Claus) on December 6 or other saints, Christmas celebration itself was postponed.

There were plenty of great Advent songs to sing: “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus”; “People Look East”; “Hark the Glad Sound!”; “On Jordan’s Banks the Baptist Cries”; “Joy to the World”; and everyone’s favorite, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” And there were plenty of great traditions: the lighting of Advent candles on an evergreen wreath; the Jesse Tree (a tradition going back to the twelfth century in some forms); Advent calendars, many of which include both a small treat and a Bible verse; and many others besides. It was a season of joy but also of waiting for the big party time.

If some of the more fun practices have made a comeback, the waiting aspect, especially the ascetical part of it, is a tough sell. Yet that has been a big part from the beginning. Historians tell us that the origins of Advent followed close upon the fourth-century practice of celebrating Christmas itself—the Mass of Christ’s Nativity, or birth. By at least the 380s, if not earlier, Christians in Spain began to practice a time of heightened communal prayer and asceticism starting on December 17 and lasting until Epiphany. By the 480s in Gaul there was a movement among monks to fast in December. Eighty years later, a local council there commanded clerics (and perhaps lay people) to fast on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays after the feast of St. Martin on November 11 until Christmas. This made a six-week preparation time, forty days to match the forty days of Lent’s preparation for Easter. In Rome, however, the practice was a four-week preparation, the practice that came to dominate western Christianity.

Today, though eastern Christians still follow that older custom of a “Nativity Fast,” which starts on November 15 and is sometimes called the “Lesser Lent,” almost no western Christians have a fast attached to the practice of Advent. In fact, some even question whether one should have an ascetical or penitential element at all. Why ought anybody to be penitential in this season? It’s not Lent, after all.  Isn’t the birth of Jesus a joyful thing?

It is indeed, but Christian joy at Christ’s coming is always going to be a reverent and even penitential joy. Advent comes from the Latin Adventus, meaning coming or appearance. Christians don’t merely celebrate the coming of a baby. They celebrate the coming of a Savior whose life was from beginning to end an offering to God his Father. A Savior who died, rose again, and will come to judge the living and the dead. That preparation for the celebration of Christ’s coming into the world as a small child is at the same time a preparation for his second coming as both Savior and Judge. Christians who practice disciplines such as fasting, giving to the poor, and more prayer are reminding themselves that Christ’s grace is free but it is also designed to free us from attachments to the things of this world and for greater service to him. Like the child Jesus, our full glorification only comes after death to self and life for God. 

Celebrating Advent is the perfect way to ward off the Christmas blues for several reasons. It’s certainly a natural truth that we value something that we prepare for. Refraining from indulging ourselves (and overindulging) throughout December means the celebration on Christmas day will be all the sweeter. It also means we will have less of that financial and other stress the articles warn about. But most importantly, celebrating Advent the old school way—with restraint, prayer, and charitable actions—means that we will discover the beauty of Jesus’ humble birth, his faithful life, and his glorious passage from death into life in a whole new way as we wait for the celebration of his coming and for the reality of his coming again.

Thinking of Christ the savior and judge may make us tremble with fear and gratitude, but it will never give us the blues.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.