We are doing Christmas backwards. The thought occurs to me every year, but it hit me especially early this year–in late October, to be precise–when the mince pies appeared in my local coffee shop. October! We hadn’t even made it to Remembrance Day, and there they were, the premature little tempters. But my real complaint is not that Christmas starts too early; it’s that it ends too soon.
The two problems are, of course, related. By the time we’ve got through a month of Christmas shopping, baking, decorating, and after the umpteen hundredth renditions of “The Little Drummer Boy” and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” the 25th comes and goes as a relief. All that preparation and, no sooner than it’s here, it’s over.
We have frontloaded the holiday season so completely that, unless you are a small child awaiting the annual subarboreal haul, the day itself hardly stands out. The last gasp of a tired season. A few extra hours of indulgence and then back to work, or if you are lucky enough to have the time off, that purgatorial week between Christmas and New Year’s. The leftover season.
As I said, it’s backwards, and the solution is to flip it around. Rather than ending Christmas after second helpings on the 25th, in a lopsided paper crown and a haze of Chardonnay and tryptophan, that feast should be the beginning of the celebrations, a gastronomic starting gun for the 12 days of Christmas.
The ambitious could carry their festivities all the way to Candlemas, the old date for taking down Christmas decorations. It wouldn’t necessarily mean six full weeks of overstuffed excess—no more, at least, than we now indulge during the six weeks before Christmas—it would just mean reversing the order of our celebrations.
It would start with reviving the spirit of Advent, the traditional season of anticipation and longing, with its distinctive hymns and carols and the haunting “O Antiphons,” which used to be sung at Vespers and are remembered today in the great Advent hymn “O Come O Come Emmanuel.”
Comments (6)
Excellent thoughts. We are inclined to follow this advice somewhat although it is difficult in this world.