For me, the Christmas season starts on Christmas Eve at 6pm, and ends on Epiphany, January 6. TheThanksgiving to Christmas Eve period, the so-called holiday shopping season, plays no part in it. The older I get, the more disdain I have for the holiday shopping season, which seems more a celebration of consumerism than a religious observance of any kind. Any religion would be ashamed to call a season holy that starts with the farcical Black Friday and ends with drunken office parties and a scramble to buy gift cards for people you barely know but have heard have bought gifts for you. So I have disavowed it, and did what Christians for millennia have done in the weeks before Christmas. I observed Advent. I prepared.
What does it mean to prepare? Who knows. Maybe to spend time in contemplation. Maybe to read, think, and write about things that pertain to the spiritual life. Probably it means something different to each person who seeks to prepare, since preparation means readiness and only the individual can know when he or she is finally ready. Whatever it means, it has nothing to do with Xboxes, auto leasing, or Ugg boots.
There is one thing I have noticed in my own life. When I take time out for prayer, my life comes into order. When I don't, it tends to fall apart. Bad habits creep back when I cease to attend to my spiritual well-being -- I feel more hostile towards others, and more frustrated with daily life, empty. My goals slip away. I could come up with a mundane reason for this, maybe prayer relieves stress or helps focus my thoughts, maybe it helps me to call upon deeper resources within myself. Or the less mundane: Maybe God really does show up and put things in order. There is no need for me to explain it one way or another. It works, and that is good enough for me.
So when the sound and fury of the holidays ends, which occurs at about 6pm Christmas Eve when the malls close, I begin my celebration. I sing the carols, I look at the Christmas tree, now bereft of gifts as it should be, and admire it for what it is -- a symbol of the abundance in my life, for which I am thankful.
And unlike society, which tends to end celebrations as soon as there is no more money to be made, I linger behind in the Temple of Plenty while the crowds march out with their loot, my heart full of the things that are truly valuable.
This celebration goes on until January 6. Because in Catholicism January 6 is the last day of the Christmas season. Go into a Catholic church on that day and you will see the church decked out the way everyplace else was on December 24. Celebrating alone but forcefully that Christmas has nothing to do with retail sales.
The finest moment -- though not necessarily the finest day -- of Christmas is at the Mass on Epiphany, when we belt out the carols one last time, almost two weeks too late for most people. But for me, that moment is glorious, for it is then that we celebrate Christmas for what is should be, a dance of salvation. At that moment, absolutely nothing of the crass moneychanging that threatens to ruin the holiday remains.