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Saint Paul
Thursday, March 28, 2024

‘Dragging out Christmas’

Father Charles Lachowitzer

I have been called an “Advent Scrooge.” In my various assignments, big-hearted people have wanted to decorate the offices right after Thanksgiving with the style of the holiday season. Evergreen boughs and red bows. I’m fine with festive decorations — when it is Christmas.

Many a mortified receptionist has had to explain the lack of any decorations as an edict from the Advent Scrooge. I overheard one parish receptionist say to a visitor who wondered aloud why the lobby looked like Lent, “The pastor wants us to wait until Christmas to decorate.” The visitor replied, “By then Christmas will be over!”

Father Charles Lachowitzer
Father Charles Lachowitzer

Over? The season begins in the darkness of Christmas Eve and continues until the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, this year on Jan. 9, 2022. Try finding on the radio any Christmas music on Dec. 26. Most people will end the holidays with an exhausted, “Happy New Year.”

With the holidays starting with Halloween, the last gasp of Advent-waiting is when people put up a manger scene in November but put the baby Jesus in the crib on Christmas Eve.

For decades, at Mass and out and about, I have said “Merry Christmas” right up to the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Once a friend said to me, “It can be kind of annoying the way you drag out Christmas.” I was uncharacteristically brief in my non-defensive clarification about the entirety of the Christmas season, but the criticism has stuck with me. “Drag out Christmas?”

I’m trying to understand why people play “Silent Night” to get into the mood for Thanksgiving. I get it when people fill labeled totes shortly after Christmas Day. I suppose it is necessary to dump the real tree before it is a fire hazard. But what is the hurry with the artificial trees? The malls of everything, who do want to drag out the holiday shopping season, give up their garlands on Jan. 2.

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It is spiritually very fruitful to start the Christmas season on the great feast of Christmas and stay with Christmas through the whole season. Otherwise, we might as well just say, “Happy Holidays!”

We do the holidays, but God does Christmas. God’s Christmas gifts are throughout the season and always what we need. We don’t need a storage bin for the treasures that are eternal. The gifts of the holidays are temporary. By next year, some will be too small; some will break or wear out; some will go into storage or be displayed at garage sales; others are only special because of the giver. The gifts of Christmas by contrast are the only ones we can take with us through the veil of death.

As the children of God, let us not just open one day’s present and call it quits. What family would take down the Christmas tree before Santa’s appointed day? Explain that to the children.

There is a significant difference between the holidays and the Christmas season. The Christmas season begins with the joyous celebration of the Nativity of Jesus. Then it continues with Mary, Mother of God, the Holy Family, Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord.

Throughout these special events, the mystery of the Incarnation unfolds. Throughout these feasts the soul is fed. We are drawn closer to Jesus, his mother Mary, the Eucharist and the treasures of heaven. Each year we deepen our understanding that Christmas is the birth of Easter.

We enter into the fullness of the Christmas season to spiritually renew ourselves as disciples of Jesus Christ. There is a reason for the whole season. The holidays may be over soon, but it is our Christian witness to drag out Christmas.

So, until Jan. 9, keep saying, “Merry Christmas!”

“Arrastrando fuera la Navidad”

 


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