Ok so I am going to apologize in advance for this little counter cultural rant but hear me out: stop skipping Thanksgiving in anticipation of Christmas!
I get it, Christmas brings out all the warm and fuzzies, but Thanksgiving can also serve to ground us and give us a moment to pause as a country before the frenzy of Christmas comes around. I saw so many people putting up Christmas decorations right after Halloween this year especially. Ultimately I really don’t care, you do you, but I just feel it was getting extremely out of hand.
Now this isn’t meant to be a religious monologue where I tell you the way I practice my religion is better than yours, because it isn’t and I don’t, but Christmas is a religious holiday so it’s inevitable. Instead this is meant to be a message to think about a different way of doing it that might be better regardless of religious practice.
For the love of pumpkin spice, you would think people would want to continue to celebrate fall just a little longer but I think the jump to Christmas comes out of a misunderstanding of when Christmas actually starts and ends. I notice those that tend to put away the pumpkins and bring out the snowmen early also tend to have everything cleared on December 26th. Well, yeah, if you take down all your Christmas decor December 26th I get why you’d want to put it all up pre-Thanksgiving. But the Christmas season actually starts with Christmas Eve and doesn’t end on Christmas Day!
You know the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas”? We’ll it’s not about the Hallmark Christmas movies that go on all of December; it’s about the twelve days after Christmas Day. The actual Christmas season goes from the vigil of Christmas (aka Christmas Eve or Noche Buena if you are Hispanic like me) and lasts all the way until the Epiphany, January 6th. FYI the Epiphany commemorates the day the Three Wise Men visited baby Jesus (see painting below).
Read more: Catholic Culture: The Twelve Days of Christmas
So as you can see, I am not arguing for celebrating less Christmas, but a shifted Christmas. You get 12 more days of Christmas after Christmas Day if you celebrate it the historic way! Now as a Catholic, we have a very specific season pre-Christmas called Advent. I personally love advent as a period of waiting and anticipation but I’m not going to try and force you to celebrate that with me.
Read more: Catholic Culture: Advent
So I know this little rant will literally make no ripples in the overly saturated commercial clusterf*ck that the American stores call “Christmas.” But I feel infinitely better for writing it publicly for others to read and mayyyybeee change their minds. 🙂
Happy Holidays y’all!!!
JMF
