That Old Time Religion

Children's Christmas pageants are now done
before Christmas instead of January 6th

Christmas was simpler when I was a child in the '50's. The tree, lights, and presents were all put up or purchased in the two weeks before Christmas. On Christmas morning I opened maybe three gifts and was lucky if they weren't all clothes. If I did get a toy, book, or game, it was the focus of my attention for the next several months.

December 25th marked the start of Christmas, not its end like today. The tree stayed up through the 12th day, and the 13th was January 6th, Epiphany, the next season on the Church calendar. Speaking of church, there were many services to attend; on December 24th there was afternoon worship for kids and a midnight mass with the adults dressed in finery. The Christmas Day morning service fulfilled our church obligations, then we were off to various gatherings on both sides of the family.

I miss the traditional Christmas.

The 12 days of Christmas run from Dec. 25 through Jan. 5, with that last evening called Twelfth Night—the evening before Epiphany. It’s a time for skits, with a Lord of Misrule appointed to lead the festivities: an evening of “cakes and ale,” as Shakespeare has the drunken Sir Toby proclaim in his own “Twelfth Night” play.

Advent—from the fourth Sunday before Christmas to Christmas Eve—is a penitential season: a lean time for reflection and confession to prepare believers for the immensity of the birth in Bethlehem. But over the past 150 or so years, Christmas has eaten up Advent, gobbled it down with turkey giblets, and hammered it flat with clove-studded hams. The celebrations have reached so far up the calendar that Christmas arrives as an exhausting end of the season rather than its penitentially anticipated beginning. The partridge in a pear tree is supposed to arrive Christmas Day, not Dec. 14.

The actual Christmas season moves from Christmas to the Feast of St. Stephen on Dec. 26. And then the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the children slaughtered by King Herod. Then the Feast of the Holy Family, then Hogmanay, the Feast of St. Sylvester. The Solemnity of Mary, the Feast of the Holy Name, and all the rest.

I also want to reclaim January 6th from political partisanship as the Feast of the Epiphany, but that's another discussion.