It’s that time of year again. The tree is twinkling at me from the corner of the living room, I have just finished making the cake, and my festive socks (tastefully wintery, I like to think, rather than garishly jolly) have resurfaced from the depths of my top drawer for another year.
If I had my way, I wouldn’t work in December. I would spend my days decorating the house, testing recipes and eating mince pies, while the sounds of Christmas filled every room, from medieval plainchant to 20th century carols (and the occasional pop-classic would make an appearance as well). As it is, I always take the last two weeks off work: a time to disconnected from some things, and to reconnect with others; to relax and to entertain.
Yet there is a tension at the heart of December.
I am not a Christian, but I appreciate (in both senses of the word) the Christian meanings of Advent and Christmas: a period of personal preparation and anticipation, followed by celebration. The concept of Advent, of preparing for Christmas – personally and spiritually, and not just by tidying the house and remembering to ‘stir-up’ your Christmas pudding – is something that really resonates with us. Advent is a season of waiting, of abstaining. There is pleasure and satisfaction to be had in looking forward to something.
Yet running alongside this Christian concept of Advent is something rather more secular: a season of unbridled consumerism and consumption, when Advent is transformed into twenty-four opportunities to indulge, followed by an opportunity to indulge even more, especially if that indulgence comes in the form of a purchasing treats (for ourselves) and gifts (for others).
Of course, you might say why not? Why shouldn’t you treat yourself? Why not gift generously to friends and family? Why – if you are not a Christian – should you spend the days of Advent in what might seem, to modern readers, like puritanical purgatory?
Don’t get me wrong: I love nothing more than welcoming friends and family into our home and treating them to good food, drink and gifts (except, perhaps, being welcomed and treated in return). But generosity doesn’t only have to take the form of consumerism; in fact, this is very far from the real meaning of Advent.
Adventus
The word Advent comes from the Latin word adventus, meaning ‘a coming, an approach, arrival’.[i] For Christians, it is a season of preparation for (and looking forward to) both the birth of Jesus at Christmas and the promised return of Christ. It is about remaining resolutely rooted in the present, contemplating one’s own personal relationship with Jesus through daily prayer and weekly Sunday services. Advent also marks the beginning of the Christian calendar.
The Christian season of Advent begins, not necessarily on 1 December, but on the First Sunday of Advent, which can fall anytime between 27 November and 3 December. There are always four Sundays in Advent, so the easiest way to calculate the beginning of Advent in any given year is to count four Sundays back from Christmas Day (not counting Christmas Day itself, if this happens to fall on a Sunday).
Each of the four Sundays of Advent hold symbolic meanings – traditionally hope, peace, joy and love – each representing different aspects of Jesus’s ministry (i.e., his life and teachings), and reminding believers of what is to come. Often an Advent wreath with four candles (or sometimes five, to include Christmas Day) is used in church to mark each of these Sundays, probably the forerunner of our modern advent calendar. As a result, the Christian Advent is about anticipation and delayed gratification, patience and restraint.
The season of Advent ends, and Christmas begins: a season of celebration and commemoration, beginning with Christmas Day itself on 25 December, and ending with Twelfth Night on 5 January. Christmas Day also marks the last of the old Quarter Days, four significant signposts in the civic calendar, and therefore the beginning of Winter.
Jesus was unlikely to have been born on the 25 December, and it seems very likely that the day was chosen by the early Christian Church due to its proximity to the Winter Solstice and other religious festivals taking place at this time of year, particularly the Roman festival of Saturnalia and the Norse festival of Yule.[ii] By aligning the birth of Jesus with these existing celebrations of nature, light and rebirth, the early Church was able to present Christianity within the framework of pagan beliefs, making the process of conversion easier.
Modern Advent
So, why do we now associate the festive season with treats and gifting, shopping and feasting?
We owe much of our modern concept of Christmas to the Victorian period, during which, according to early music expert William Lyons, ‘Christmas underwent something of a reboot’.[iii] Gift-giving, for instance, was moved from its traditional associations with St Nicholas’ Day (6 December) and New Year’s Day (1 January) to Christmas Day. Similarly, Christmas trees, Christmas cake and Christmas pudding all either originated or were popularised by Victorian culture, especially by Charles Dickens and by the royal family.
These new ‘traditions’ were born from an era of industrialisation and commercialisation, when the height of the British Empire brought trade and goods from around the world to our doorstep, and to a wider section of society than ever before. In this way, the Victorians also invented another festive ‘tradition’: Christmas shopping.
While the details may have changed, the dominance of global capitalism has only accelerated ever since, and today the association between shopping and Christmas is so pervasive that it is almost invisible. Supermarkets sell us a vision of an ideal Christmas that is ready-made and available off-the-shelf, while advent calendars, gingerbread lattes and novelty jumpers tempt us into a month-long spree of indulgence and spending.
Capitalist consumerism has hijacked Christmas in much the same way as the early Church had hijacked the celebrations of Saturnalia and Yule. The difference is, while the Christian idea of Advent taught what most people would consider positive values like patience and restraint, our contemporary festive season seems to promote the opposite; impulsiveness and greed.
Our Advent
Like the Victorians, we are keen inventors of traditions. I suspect a lot of people are, especially around Christmas: every family seems to have its own unique celebrations, rituals and timetables. With our traditions, we try to strike a balance between the slow and patient, and the generous and festive, while avoiding the worst excesses of consumerism.
Here are a few of our traditions:
Every year, on 1 November, I pull our (now rather beaten-up) copy of Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles out from the bookcase and read the introduction: his reflections on the winter months and the build-up to Christmas are the perfect prelude to the festive season.
Every year, on 30 November, we retrieve the handmade advent calendar we made more than 10 years ago from under the stairs – 24 individually decorated boxes in the shape of stars and stockings – and hang these on a small tree in our bedroom, while listening to Michael Ball’s 1999 Christmas Album.
Every year, on the first Saturday of December, we travel into Cambridge to visit the Mill Road Winter Fair, a wonderful volunteer-run festival, celebrating the diversity of the area’s residents and businesses. It has a particular importance to us, as it was where Elle and I had our first date back in 2012, and where I proposed to her the following year.
Every year, usually on Boxing Day, we invite family to our home to enjoy a feast of ‘pickings’; homemade treats, made from ingredients we have either grown, foraged or sourced locally, including chutneys from our garden produce, a honey-and-mustard-glazed ham made from our local, high-welfare butchers, and the annual batch of sloe gin using fruit from the hedgerows around our house.
Until this year, every year we would make toys, stuffed with catnip and leftover fabric scraps from Elle’s sewing, to give to our cats on Christmas, but this – along with many other routines and rituals – ended when we lost our last cat, Smudger, earlier this year.
This year, as we move back into Advent, we will be enjoying a calm, quiet celebration, looking forward to Christmas without being manipulated into overindulging, focusing on the homemade and the reused, and perhaps even creating some more annual traditions…
For anyone who has made it this far in this (admittedly long) blog post, and want to know more, here is some recommended reading:
Brian Day, A Chronicle of Folk Customs: A Day-to-Day Guide to Folk Traditions (1999)
L. W. Cowie and John Selwyn Gummer, The Christian Calendar (1974)
Lia Leendertz, The Almanac
Nicholas Holtam, Sleepers Awake: Getting Serious About Climate Change (2022)
Nigel Slater, The Christmas Chronicles (2017)
Rachel Mann, Do Not Be Afraid: The Joy of Waiting in a Time of Fear (2024)
Rachel Mann, In the Bleak Midwinter: Through Advent and Christmas with Christina Rossetti (2019)
The Book of Common Prayer (1549)
[i] Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, available online from Perseus, accessed 28 November from https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=adventus&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059
[ii] L. W. Cowie and John Selwyn Gummer, The Christian Calendar (London, 1974), pp.21-23.
[iii] William Lyons, speaking with Donald Macleod on BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week, ‘A Medieval Christmas’, 8 December 2023.
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