When I was a kid, our advent calendar was full of candy. That was enough for me. The calendar itself was a length of felt. Its color was off-white, something like the background color of this blog. There were rows of pockets, each with a felt image of Santa preparing for Christmas in different ways. One had him carrying a tree, another had him carrying a big star to decorate it. Most importantly, however, was that each pocket had two pieces of candy. If my sister and I ate our dinner, we would get a Hershey kiss or a little peanut-butter cup. I wanted that candy, so all throughout Advent I was a very good eater (my parents may remember this detail differently).

^{My mother very kindly sent a picture of the advent calendar that I describe above!}

For me as a kid, that’s all that Advent was: candy after dinner. Yes, we had up Advent and Christmas decorations all throughout December, but if you asked me then which of those decorations were for Advent and which were for Christmas, I wouldn’t have even understood the question. The Advent and Christmas seasons bled together. We listened to O Come, O Come Emmanuel, Joy to the World, and We Three Kings back-to-back, regardless and probably oblivious to the fact that one is an Advent hymn, one a Christmas hymn, and the other an Epiphany hymn.

Since my childhood, I’ve gone to seminary, been ordained a priest, led congregations through each of the three above seasons, and read a ton of books about the importance of each in our lives as Christians. Currently, I’m reading Abraham Heschel’s book The Sabbath, a book that has fully convinced me of the importance of sanctifying time. Our spirits – our individual spirits and the spirits of our communities – are nurtured in the calm quiet of Advent, the joyful and exuberant twelve days of Christmas, and the Epiphany’s important lesson that revelation doesn’t always come from within the safety net of our home communities. Being humble to these themes, learning from them, and joining with the Spirit as we are pulled deeper into our conversion to the Gospel – these are great and wonderful things that I see becoming more and more important to a wide variety of Christians.

In writing all of this, I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t decorate your Christmas tree or obtain from any joyful, exuberant Christmas music during Advent. It’s easy to be a grinch about when the Christmas season starts. I’m not a fan of seeing Christmas decorations in stores in September, but grumbling about how early the season starts can hurt our spirits in different ways. I’m not sure if there is a spiritual benefit in being a watchdog for early celebrators. And I think this because, as with most things, there’s a beautiful middle-ground between keeping strict holiday seasons, bringing out Christmas decorations in August, and the joyful innocence of thinking that Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany are all one glorious season.

^{The base of our advent wreath. We usually set this in the middle of the kitchen table, but it has had different homes in the house throughout the years! The girls look forward to when they can light the candles themselves (no, not until you’re eighteen!)}

When my wife and I were newly married, we started decorating for Christmas at 12:01 a.m., the day after Thanksgiving. We were ravenous for Christmas and all of that joy. We found out, however, that by the time Christmas rolled around, we were almost too tired to celebrate. And so we slackened off and took our time decorating. But we were too slack, and often we never really got into the Christmas spirit before we had to take down the tree. When our children were born, we remembered our own childhoods and bought advent calendars to mark the days, but we bought too many, so that we got buried beneath the different rituals of when to do which calendars, how, when, and who got to light a candle or put up a little bauble on a wooden tree. Last year we got to tired of all this that we didn’t finish some of our calendars, and we were (then) fine with that. In all this, we were left wondering which traditions were important enough to continue and which we should let go of. And I don’t know about you, but weighing the importance of traditions is pretty uncomfortable. It feels like the opposite of prayerfulness.

^{Mary, Joseph, and one of the three wisemen from a set of peg dolls that one of our daughter’s godmothers made for her. These are prime objects of play for the girls and never stay as a well-organized set (thus why I could only find three of them for this picture!).}

So what are we doing this year? What is that magical middle-ground between paying too much attention to the season and not enough? I’m not sure just yet, but I do know that little Timmy Hannon may have known something about it way back in the 80s. There is something important about Advent and about Christmas. I think there’s something important about the Epiphany, too, but let’s just stick with the first two. When I think back to my early childhood, to excitement of getting little candies, to the short days and eating dinner when it was pitch black out, to candles that needed to be lit as much for need as they were for tradition, I sense a sort of “weightiness” to it all. There was an importance to the season that included candy and a morning of opening presents, but getting things didn’t come close to encompassing it all. It’s the same weight of celebrating the Eucharist on Christmas Eve at midnight (or at 10:00 as we do here). It’s the weight of the Easter Vigil, too. It’s the weight of sitting with a Christmas tree when everyone else is asleep and only the tree’s lights are on, then looking up and seeing the shadows of the branches on the ceiling. It’s the weight of watching the snow fall from inside a warm house in the middle of the night. There’s even a bit of it in the freshness of the morning of New Year’s Day. It is a holiness to things that are dark and beautiful and so full of God’s gentle love and presence.

I think I understood that holiness as a little boy. I think my two little girls understand that holiness when they count the days until Christmas with all the various calendars we have for Advent. In fact, I know they do. This month, one of my five-year old’s assignments is to make something that represents one of our family traditions. She chose to make an advent calendar. She cut out little red and green squares, wrote the numbers one through twenty-four on them, and pasted them on a sheet, all in a row. And popping up from behind these boxes are all sorts of different things: sleds, snowflakes, gnome faces, Santa and his big bushy beard, stars, and so on. This is what she chose to make to explain something important about her family and this time of year. In making this project, is she showing that she “gets” Advent and Christmas and the full weight of holiness in God’s Creation? No, but that’s not the point. Her job is to love that holiness wherever God so lovingly chooses to reveal it. God may have revealed that holiness in jack-o-lanterns or pink heart glitter or even keeping our Christmas tree up all year (as my sister-in-law does). But she chose an advent calendar. Isn’t that beautiful?