by Keith Bassham
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but working a month ahead on a magazine gives me a headache around the holidays. The November election was just a few days ago, and we’ve been working on the Christmas issue of the Tribune since before Halloween. It’s hard to get myself in the proper frame of mind to write about stables and mangers and such.
Life is not like it used to be. Before DVDs and streaming video, you could figure out how you were doing with things like holiday planning based on how the TV networks scheduled the Charlie Brown specials (it’s still a hoot to hear Linus tell the Christmas story). Life is more complex in an asynchronous social media-fied world, and planning for the holidays takes more thinking time than it used to. All I know is I positively refuse to play any Bing Crosby Christmas music before watching the WKRP “Thanksgiving Turkey Promotion” episode.
I’ve never been big on celebrating holidays when you aren’t supposed to. I object to shifting holiday observances around to accommodate a three-day weekend. My kids and I had a terrific row a few years ago when they wanted to shift our family’s Christmas celebration a couple of days for what seemed to them a good reason. I grudgingly cooperated, but I made enough noise they haven’t tried doing it since.
I’ve been thinking that over all maybe observing a season of Advent makes better sense. Advent (and Lent, for that matter) was noted in the Almanac section of the first King James Version Bibles in 1611, so that should make it sort of okay. And before you object mightily to embracing this new bit of liturgy, you might remember that before 1820, observing Christmas among Baptists was almost unheard of, just as it was among Puritans, Presbyterians, and Quakers. At the time, Christmas celebrating was still more a European idea, you know. Congress even met on Christmas Day from 1789 to 1855, public schools met in Boston on Christmas until 1870, and the first state to make the day a legal holiday was Alabama in 1836. Christmas has come a long way since then, or has it?
Think about it. Christmas, the way it is observed in our culture, is almost certain to be mostly secular, materialistic, and commercial. If there is some religious significance for people, it is usually more sentimentality than anything else. The most popular Christmas song, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” was written by a Jew and makes no mention at all of God or Jesus. It’s all about going home and being with friends and remembering good old days.
Advent, on the other hand, is all about the appearance of Jesus into the world, which is what we want Christmas to be about. I don’t know that celebrating Advent is the way to go, but it may be the solution to the Christmas wars. I’m just throwing it out there. I, and the Tribune staff, wish you a wonderful Christmas in the meantime.