Holidays matter.
Our nation’s holidays were at one time rooted in faith. Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving were the big three and each had a profound spiritual dimension. Each was deeply meaningful (for those who had interest in leaning into the meaning) and were marked by wonderful traditions that were passed down from generation to generation. Each provided opportunities for extravagant worship as we meditated on the gospel, the work, and the goodness of God.
HOLIDAYS SHAPE US
Our holidays provided a needed break from the daily drudgery of life’s struggles, time off work to rest, and time to gather as friends and families. Holidays shaped us. They renewed us, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. They were good for our souls. God likes holidays, the Sabbath, the first holiday, was His idea. Israel’s feasts were written right into the law, God insisted that they remember and celebrate.
Yet we have, as a nation, drifted far from our Christian roots, and now our historic “big three” have been replaced by three new holidays: Pride week (month/season?), Halloween, and a secularized, confused imitation of Christmas (plus Hanukkah) where we are expected to avoid all mention of Christ for the sake of universal inclusion. This has meant that our nation’s holidays have no spiritual roots, rendering them essentially meaningless. Have you noticed this? They’ve been reduced to merely days off work, long weekends so we can get away. Nothing deeper or more historical for us to connect with, to reorient us, or to give us anchors. Now it’s all about pursuing pleasure through food, drink, travel, sex, socializing, and spending. Everything eternal has been abandoned.
However, as Christians, we don’t have to follow this march towards emptiness and nihilism. We are citizens of a different country and our heavenly home has holidays. They are all focused on Jesus. They each give attention to actual historic moments of His life or works that He has done. They are more than just days off work or sentimental traditions to be kept— they renew our links to the wellspring of life and joy.
CHRISTIAN HOLIDAYS
Universally, Christians celebrate Christmas and Easter weekend, but the Church calendar1 has an even more extensive schedule of holy-days, all oriented around the gospel, and including the celebration of incredibly important and historical dates such as Pentecost and the Ascension of Christ.
It seems that as our culture becomes more and more aggressively secular, there is a growing hunger in the Church to reclaim and live into some of the ancient ways that are full of meaning. For those who follow the Church calendar, we’re currently in the season of Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas that are packed with tradition and meaning. This time has been set aside to focus on preparation and building anticipation for the arrival of Christ, then Christmas comes, with joy to the world! and is followed by 11 more days of blow-out celebration of Jesus’s arrival. These days from Christmas Day until January 5th are traditionally known as the Twelve Days of Christmas. By the end of it, you’ve read, prayed, sung, and reflected deeply on all the events around the most important moment in the history of the universe — Jesus’s birth, God, becoming man, and dwelling among us. And of course, it’s changed you, grounded you, filled you with a renewed sense of God’s love and your value to Him…”a soul feels its worth” as the carol goes.
But because Christmas has been co-opted by our culture, we need to be aware of the secular version. We can get caught in trying to straddle both worlds, which inevitably we’ll find exhausting and overwhelming. Our culture holds all the parties, concerts, and events before Christmas, (generally with all mention of Christ surgically removed), then Christmas Day is one jam-packed marathon of festivities, from stockings to turkey feasts— followed by days of the sad anti-climax of gift returns, boxing day sales, de-Christmasing the house, taking down the tree and getting on the scales to see how much weight we're going to need to lose.
Our culture, starved for meaning, tries to find meaning in Christmas by making it all about family. But as important and godly as family is, it’s not enough.
You can hear it in the songs, see it in the Christmas movies, notice it in the nature of events and celebrations. For secular Christmas, family has taken centre stage, but the image of a Hallmark movie family stands in stark contrast to the broken reality that’s all around us. Divorce, illness, alienated children, depression, gender confusion, ideological extremism, and addictions have ravaged most families. That hope of something greater, even somewhat transcendent, that we try to draw from this family moment inevitably falls flat. We need meaning and Christmas is the high point holiday where our expectations are raised for this longing to be satisfied. This sad situation reminds me of the scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where it was always winter— yet never Christmas.
If we’ve been pulled into the spirit of the world which is so prevalent in this season, we will also struggle with the fruits it bears; the sadness and the striving. In an effort to get what we long for out of the holidays, we may try to adjust how we celebrate, resolving to do Christmas better next year, which could mean a wide variety of things — a greater effort to celebrate, or the opposite, with a simpler, stripped down version. It could mean a better front yard light show, a trip to go cut a real tree, more extensive hospitality, maybe more organized gift-giving….
We keep trying to make Christmas scratch that itch that it seems like it should, but doesn’t, as we follow our culture’s path of celebration. Then of course, for many, the focus on family just highlights what we don’t have, exacerbating a sense of isolation, opening the door for depression to haunt Christmas and its aftermath, to the point that for many, this season is the darkest time of the year.
Our culture’s secular Christmas avoids the cosmic, eternal, wellspring of joy, the truly “good news of great joy”, and substitutes gazing on Jesus— with sustained awe and worship— with lesser, earthly delights. If we follow the world’s path we’ll gloss over the jaw-dropping wonder of the incarnation, clutter our lead-up to Christmas with excesses, then quickly pivot to jettison everything Christmasy once the 26th has arrived.
RECLAIM
Were we to reclaim this most Christian holiday, taking it back from secular culture and corporate marketers, what would it look like? How could we celebrate Advent and Christmas with holy intentionality to the point that we find that soul-satisfying depth of meaning as well as the refreshing and renewal, and not just for us individually but for our families and churches? Might we build our practices and traditions around worshiping Jesus and corporately drawing near to Him in celebration as the centrepoint? How might really holding Jesus as the centre infuse us with sustaining, overflowing, joy and renew in us a fire of love for our Saviour, rather than looking to the sad temporal substitutes of too much food, wine, socializing, and spending? All these substitutes that we expect to fill us with joy come up lacking and their hollow inadequacy leads to gloom and feelings of empty hopelessness. We could do Christmas differently. We could take leadership and thoughtfully choose, for us and our household, to reclaim this season.
BEGIN WITH ADVENT
The Church calendar starts with Advent, so that’s a good place to start. The word means “arrival”. It’s four weeks for preparing our hearts to celebrate Christ’s coming, past present and future tense. He has come! He does come (in Holy Spirit visitations— this is the revival piece)! And He is coming (as the King and Judge of all the Earth)!
Each one of these tenses, past, present, and future, is worthy of sitting in and reflecting upon, allowing the wonder and joy of these realities to soak into our souls. As surely has He did come, many of us have experienced His continual coming by the power of the Holy Spirit, being with us in tangible, glorious, ways, bringing His light and healing and redemption. We call this revival. Come Holy Spirit.
Then as surely as He has come, and He does come, He will come, making all things new, restoring the earth, establishing justice, and resurrecting all His people to be with Him forever. Heaven and earth will be fully united as we will ever more be with Him and He with us.
This Advent preparing of our hearts process is the same as preparing for revival. How would we prepare ourselves if we knew Jesus was about to manifest in the room with the most present and intense visitation you could imagine, you know, the kind where everyone spontaneously falls on their faces before Him? Might I suggest, that we would take time to seriously search our hearts, becoming aware, by the leading of the Spirit, if there was any wicked way in us, any point of pride, greed, selfishness, deception, or other besetting sin (Ps 139:23,24). I think as well, we would look to see if our hearts have fallen into lukewarmness (Rev 3:15,16). Are we loving the Lord our God with all our hearts, soul, mind, and strength (Mt 22:37)? Preparing involves returning to our first love— the high watermark of devotion to Jesus that we once lived in regardless of when that was (Rev 2:3,4).
Preparing also means making sure we are obeying His second command. Are we loving our neighbour as ourselves (Mk12:31)? Caring for the poor in the way he instructed us (Mt 25:40)? Are we making sure that there is no one against whom we are harboring unforgiveness (Mt 6:12)? Are we committed to the Body, living in open, invested, relationships in our local church (Eph 4:15,16)? Then finally, preparing means taking leadership over the fleshly noise in our lives, and choosing to focus our attention on Christ Himself in worshipful adoration, allowing our longing for Him to rise to the surface and find its voice (Mt 6:33).
There is no shortage of “Daily Advent Devotional” booklets that are offered up this time of year. While I’m sure all are well-intentioned, not all may be helpful. Some are just a compilation of Christmas-themed thoughts that are just as shallow and sentimental as Bing Crosby crooning about a White Christmas or Silver Bells. This too can be noise, discern carefully, do Advent resources that you might be familiar with, actually help you prepare your heart?
This Advent, I am doing a slow read through “On the Incarnation” by Church Father, St. Athanasius. It’s a small, incredibly influential book from the fourth century that explores the idea of what it means for God to become man. It’s been helping me fix my eyes on Him and behold Him with a new sense of wonder despite this year’s Advent season being incredibly dark in ways that I find very troubling. You can get it on Kindle if you want to join me in this. I like this translation, with the introduction by C.S. Lewis.
GOD LIKES HOLIDAYS
God likes holidays, in fact, they were His idea! Let’s align with Him and begin to allow our coming year to be shaped and coloured by holy days that reflect our citizenship and our heavenly home. Holy-days that are centred, like the New Jerusalem is— on the Lamb.
One day heaven and earth will become one, but for now, we can live into that eventual union, even with our holidays, as we pray “Come, Lord Jesus, come”.
I’m referring here to the Protestant Liturgical Calendar not the more complicated Catholic one with many days dedicated to the honour of various saints.