Editorial: Recapturing Advent CNS photo During the “Christmas shopping season” formerly known as Advent, we find ourselves surrounded by symbols and serenaded by music, both sacred and secular, designed to evoke joy. Because joy is what the human heart most desires, it would take a true Grinch to suggest that we Catholics should tell others to resist the joy that they feel during these days just because we remember that the Christmas season begins, rather than ends, on Christmas Day. Delighting in the company of family, co-workers and friends in anticipation of the impending birth of the Christ Child is always a good thing, even if it means lightening the traditionally penitential nature of this season known in centuries past as the “little Lent.” After all, even the most rigorous of monastic orders sometimes allow monks to break their fast in the name of hospitality.
And yet, as the celebration of Christmas begins post-Halloween, more and more people in recent years have begun to complain that Christmas Day feels like a letdown. The joy that should be the culmination of Advent has begun to fade by the time Midnight Mass starts. And that’s not surprising, because the transformation of Advent into an early Christmastide has robbed this most neglected of liturgical seasons of its defining characteristic: the cultivation of hope.
Hope, the Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us, is closely tied to the “desire [for] the kingdom of heaven and eternal life,” to the “aspiration to happiness,” to the “expectation of eternal beatitude.” The culmination of our desires, our aspirations, our expectations is found in the future: To reach their fulfillment, we must wait.
If there is one thing that our culture today cannot comprehend, it is the virtue of waiting. Instant gratification is the rule of the day. Any desire — good as well as ill — can be satisfied with the click of a link. We end up satisfied, but never satiated, because all of our desires — ill as well as good — have one true object that we can’t find on sale on Cyber Monday. As St. Augustine wrote, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
The object of all of our desires is found as a babe in the manger, as a man upon the cross, as the King of Glory descending from the clouds at the end of time. The waiting, the expectation, of Advent anticipates not just the coming of Christ at Christmas, but his coming into our hearts through grace and his Second Coming as well.

“If you want to keep Christ in Christmas,” Father John P. Mack Jr. has often said, “keep Advent in Advent.” Wait as long as you can to put up your Christmas tree; gather round the Advent wreath instead. Save the Christmas carols for Christmas Eve; dust off some old Advent hymns. Turn off “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”; read the daily selections from the Prophet Isaiah found in the Office of the Readings. Join in the St. Andrew Christmas Novena. Go to confession. Pray, fast and give alms.
We don’t have to be Advent purists who look down on those who start the celebration of Christmas a bit earlier than the liturgical calendar allows. But if we make the effort to cultivate Advent as a time of longing and of hope, to recognize that some things are worth waiting for and that the coming of Christ is the greatest of these, the joy of Christmas will not end on Christmas Day but continue to grow in our hearts throughout Christmastide.
OSV Editorial Board: Don Clemmer, Gretchen R. Crowe, Scott Richert, York Young