Why Advent?

Christmas morning 1989. I crept down the stairs in my pajamas, the windows in the kitchen beyond the front room still dark but the lights on the Christmas tree twinkling. My parents were still asleep in the next room but I couldn't help myself from coming downstairs to see what Santa had left. A stocking full of candy, hair ribbons and toothpaste and the exact yellow bike I had written about in my letter two weeks ago! I knew I would have to wait to open the presents still wrapped under the tree, but there was enough here to keep me occupied until then. Later, family gathered around the table for a meal of roast beef and potatoes, Perry Como Christmas music on the stereo and glasses of bubbling apple cider. 

The memories sparkle with magic and love but adult celebrations of Christmas tend to leave me less than thrilled. Too often the Christmas season feels like cheap plastic Santa decorations, flimsy, expensive and meaningless. Over the years I have begun to reclaim old traditions and build new ones to bring some of that sparkle and meaning back into my holiday celebration. The cornerstone of this celebration is the marking of Advent, the weeks leading up to Christmas. Like Lent, it is a time of purification and reflection before the big festival, before the big mystery. For many Christians, Advent is still a meaningful time to prepare inwardly for the birth of Christ, one of the pivotal points in Christian theology. For those of us for whom Christianity is not our native spiritual language, focusing on preparing for the holiday can help us find our own kind of meaning in this season.

There are many ways to come at Advent even with being unsure or uncomfortable with the Christian imagery of the traditional celebration.  In many pagan or goddess centered spiritualities Winter Solstice it is the height of winter and the rebirth of the year's sun. In the anthroposophic philosophies of Steiner/Waldorf education, the winter solstice is the time of the greatest in-breath, when the Earth's soul is fully incorporated into the physical earth. Winter solstice is also an astronomical time when the northern hemisphere is tilted most away from the sun and we experience the longest night. I also take great pleasure in the secular celebrations associated with Christmas - decorating, cookies, meals, mulled cider, caroling - but if we are not careful, we get swept up in the consumerist tide of buying presents and cards and other things without any real sense of what is truly meaningful about this time of year.

Advent, whether explicitly Christian, pagan, scientifically nature based or lovingly eclectic, is a way to help us create and maintain meaning through this dark season of the year. It helps ready us for the longest night and the triumphant, hopeful return of the the light. Celebrating this season thoughtfully brings us out of our own heads into a deeper understanding of the vastness of human culture and experience as well as the non-human universe. It aligns us with the cosmos in fundamental ways. Also, isn't it just more fun to celebrate in little ways for a whole month than have a gluttonous one day bender of a celebration? Well, I think it is.

This blog will be an online Advent calendar for us. As the month passes I will bring you tidbits from my own eclectic celebration of Advent. Yes, there will be Christian stuff here but there will also be Goddess stuff, and science stuff and food stuff and goofy stuff. Take what you like, enjoy it, run with it, and leave what does not resonate with you. Let me know what you like, what you do with this stuff and what Advent means to you. Happy holidays!