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The following, sent to me by Nancy Farison, is a very informative article about the radical changes that have occured relatively recently in the celebration of Christmas in North America.
Sadly, this is the reason why the Feast of our Lord's Nativity has become a one day Feast regardless of our rich liturgical cycle that links it with Epiphany, as you will read below. The surrounding "culture" has prevailed over the Church.
The final, two-sentence paragraph "speaks volumes," as the saying goes.
~~~
Dear Father,
This came from a parishioner at Christ the Savior, CT. I thought this was very insightful....
Nancy
This column was syndicated by Scripps Howard News Service on 12/12/2007:
There was a time when Christians did not celebrate a season that could be
called the 30-something days of Christmas.
In the year of our Lord 1939, the National Retail Dry Goods Association
asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving to the
next-to-last Thursday in November. This was strategic, since President
Abraham Lincoln had proclaimed the last Thursday of the month as the
official holiday. This meant that Thanksgiving was occasionally delayed
until a fifth Thursday -- a cruel blow to merchants.
Confusion reigned until Congress reached a compromise and, since 1942,
Thanksgiving has been observed on the fourth Thursday in November.
And thus was born America's most powerful and all-consuming season. This
later evolved into the shopping festival called "The Holidays," which in
the past generation has started creeping into stores days or weeks before
Turkey Day.
"None of this, of course, has anything to do with the Christmas traditions
that Christians have been observing through the ages," said Teresa Berger,
professor of liturgical studies at Yale Divinity School.
To be candid, she said, it does "help to remember that celebrations of
Christmas and other holy seasons have always been affected by what happens
in the marketplace and the surrounding culture. ... But that isn't what we
are seeing, today. The question now is whether or not the shopping mall
will define what is Christmas for most Christians."
Here's the bottom line. For centuries, Christmas was a 12-day season that
began on Dec. 25th and ended on Jan. 6th with the celebration of the Feast
of the Epiphany. Thus, the season of Christmas followed Christmas Day, with
most people preparing for the holy day in a festive blitz during the final
days or even hours, with many stores staying open until midnight on
Christmas Eve.
Today, everything has been flipped around, with the Christmas or Holiday
season preceding Dec. 25.
For most Americans, this season begins with an explosion of shopping on
Black Friday after Thanksgiving, followed by a flurry of office parties
and school events packed into early December. The goal is to hold as many
of these events as possible long before the onset of the complicated
travel schedules that shape the lives of many individuals and families.
Meanwhile, television networks, radio stations and newspapers have created
their own versions of the "12 days of Christmas," inserting them before --
often long before -- Dec. 25 as a secular framework for advertising
campaigns, civic charity projects, holiday music marathons, parades,
house-decorating competitions and waves of mushy movies, old and new.
Needless to say, this is not the Christmas that Berger knew as she grew
up in Germany in the post-World War II era. As a Catholic, the days
between Christmas and Epiphany were marked by a series of events -- such
as the feasts of St. Stephen and St. John the Evangelist -- that were
accompanied by their own rites and customs. Lutherans and other Christians
had their own traditions for marking this time.
"When people talk about a season called the 'Twelve Days of Christmas,'
they are primarily talking about something that was much more common in
England," said Berger. "There are many reasons for that, not the least of
which was the popularity of the song by that name."
While these traditions took various forms, the key was that the religious
elements of the season remained intact. Christians celebrated Christmas
during Christmas.
Berger said that it still makes her a bit uncomfortable when she sees
families putting up and decorating their Christmas trees before they are
even finished using the candles and green wreathes associated with the
penitential season of Advent, which begins on the fourth Sunday before
Christmas. There are many more people, of course, who do not observe
Advent, which is called Nativity Lent in Orthodox churches.
"Today, people believe they can have whatever they want, when they want
it, and Christmas becomes whatever the culture says that it is," she said.
"We can, however, revolt against this. We can choose, for example, not to
send out 1,000 mindless Christmas cards. We can sit down and write our own
cards and even breathe a prayer for the people we love while we do that.
"No one can force us to live according to the laws of the new Christmas.
We can make our own choices."
Terry Mattingly (www.tmatt.net) directs the Washington Journalism Center
at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. He writes this
weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service.
