Reclaim Christmas

By reinstating Advent

It’s still Christmas.

It’s such a shame that Christmas feels like it ends just after lunch on Christmas Day. Maybe some opening of presents keeps the feeling going a little longer. But by the evening, you don’t really want to see a Christmas special of your favourite TV drama or sitcom set at Christmas. You want to move on. The new year is coming. Resolutions. Boxing Day sales. Housework. Sorting out stuff. Taxes.

We can’t enjoy the moment for anything more than a moment. We experience the joy of the thing we’ve been building up to, then it all palls. We live in a world of hedonism. But we don’t actually know how to enjoy ourselves.

Delayed Gratification

It stems from impatience. If you could describe the 21st century in two words, how about ‘On demand’? Whatever you want is there when you want it.

This impatience is not a new phenomenon. Impatience is a besetting sin of humanity. Adam and Eve reached out for the fruit that was not yet theirs to eat. I wrote about this earlier in the year over here. I really do believe that in time, they would have been given permission to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. After all, that is what kings do. They discern and judge. But they weren’t yet ready for that. They were not yet kings and queens. That was to come.

Israel was given a great king in David. But he wasn’t the first king. The Israelites demanded one prematurely for the wrong reasons. They wanted be like the nations around them, so they demanded one from Samuel. They were given a king, Saul, who was pleasing to the eye, but ultimately pretty rotten.

And look at Jesus’s parables. So many of them are about waiting. How do we wait?

Come Back, Advent

That’s what Advent teaches us. Waiting and watching for the return of Christ. Advent is actually a season of fasting. Yes, fasting. Try fasting in the UK in December. Seriously. Try it.

I did a very mild version of it. I went without yeasted bread for Advent. I only allowed myself one flatbread in the evening. Hardly asceticism, but I wanted to mark Advent.

Your society doesn’t wait for Christmas. We start it during Advent. Actually, no. We’ve abolished Advent and replaced it with Christmas. This means that when Christmas Day arrives, we’ve been half-heartedly Christmassing for a month, and we’re done with it. In fact, we’re sick of it - because it went on for a month, rather than the traditional twelve days.

So let’s reclaim Christmas by reinstating Advent.

Next time around, let’s watch and wait. And then we will know the true joy that comes at Christmas, so that Christmas Day is only the beginning, not the end.

Which is why I said at the beginning: it’s still Christmas. Because it is.

So Merry Christmas.

Would you be able to support this weekly Substack? I don’t really want to switch on the paid subscription functions. But if you like what you’ve been reading, could you make a contribution? Some have responded very generously after my appeal last week, using the example of Charles Dickens. Why not read that if you’ve not already done so?

Thank you very much if you’ve already done so. I really appreciate it. Others might have made a note to give, but not gotten around to it. You can do that by clicking the link here:

If you click and support, you’ll receive a video of me reading a chapter about Charles Dickens being visited by the Angel Gabriel from my book, The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer. And you’ll also get a PDF of an essay which begins like this:

Politics is downstream from culture.

Starter for ten. Who said that?

People throw it around quite a lot these days. Insightful, isn’t it? So you might guess CS Lewis or GK Chesterton. Maybe even Mark Twain. Wrong, wrong and wrong. It’s Andrew Breitbart. Yeah. That guy. Founder of that Trump-supporting news website.

This essay is about how the culture war has affected the Church. If we’re honest, there currently isn’t a war. There are small pockets of resistance, but the war has ended. There wasn’t a truce. The Church lost. In fact, the Church unwittingly surrendered a position of total cultural and political dominance. Why?

Christians are on the receiving end of a kicking in the political realm. A Conservative government pushed through no-fault divorce and introduced gay marriage. There is serious confusion over sex and gender. And just reading aloud sections of the Bible in public could have you arrested for hate-speech, especially in Scotland. It’s not going very well, is it?

So why not vote for the other team? At the last General Election in the UK, almost every Christian I could see on social media of all stripes was agreed on one thing: none of us liked the options. We need not dwell on the details but politics, being downstream from culture, threw up some unsavoury choices. We were invited to pick our favourite. It was not a fun decision.

But all those Christians who didn’t like the options should reflect on this: where do you think these politicians come from? Where do their ideas and policies come from? Why don’t they seem to have any political guiding philosophy beyond pure pragmatism? What dictates how they spend over 40% of our Gross National Product? By what standard are laws written and handed down to the police to enforce?

The answer should be obvious. The laws and spending priorities come from the culture. The politicians don’t set the agenda. They are given it by the artists, musicians and writers of now and yesteryear. Politics is downstream from the culture. If Christians want better political options, we need to change the culture. And to do that, we need to understand how we got here.

So let’s do that.

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