Deep Reading #6

In terms of Christmas, Catholics are fighting a losing battle. We don’t need to be reminded how far we’ve fallen from the simple celebration of Christ’s birth: instead, we have commercial companies making a push to sell us as many products as they possibly can. We push back with slogans like “not the presents but his presence” and holiday cards decorated with sacred art—but, in essence, our celebration of Christmas isn’t radically different from everyone else’s.

This isn’t going to be yet another article about “keeping Christ in Christmas.” Not that we shouldn’t try to re-make Christmas a more religious holiday—obviously we should. But that phrase—”keep Christ in Christmas”—has been put on enough bumper stickers and fridge magnets that it’s become rather meaningless. What does keeping Christ in Christmas even look like? Just going to church on Christmas and keeping the decorations up through January?

The reason why we can’t just say “keep Christ in Christmas” and leave it at that is because doing so fundamentally misunderstands the way Christmas works, and, most of the time, the actions we associate with doing that—like simply attending Church on Christmas Eve or Day—don’t even address the problem we’re dealing with. If going to Church isn’t enough, then, what are we supposed to do? We can only answer this question if we realize that we’re mixing up two distinct “types” of Christmas that don’t really go together. We’re trying to solve the problems of one type by solving the problems of another type—which isn’t going to work,

But what are these “types” I’m talking about? Christmas is just Christmas, right? In reality, it’s become a big enough deal that there are three semi-distinct Christmases. We, even in the Church, celebrate two at most—even though the third is the most important. By realizing what the places of the first two are, and by giving the third its proper place, we just might be able to restore Christmas to what it’s supposed to be.

1. Social Christmas

The first is the most obvious, and it’s the one we primarily think of when December rolls around. We go to Christmas parties at our friends’ houses. We travel to visit our family and “spend the holidays” with them. And when the twenty-fifth shows up, we give each other presents, go to church, spend time together, and eat a special meal. That’s Christmas, right? Well—actually, it’s social Christmas. It’s a section of the year we’ve set aside for paying special attention to our friends and family so we can all take a break from our jobs, spend time together, and show our appreciation for each other by giving gifts. Historically, it’d also be a time for charity, for providing food and money for people who aren’t as fortunate. Think about Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: Scrooge realizes the true value of Christmas (it’s actually more complex than that, but whatever) and does a bunch of good stuff for people who don’t have as much money as he does.

An important distinction must be made here. Social Christmas is related to, but distinct from, commercial Christmas. (Commercial Christmas isn’t included on my list; that’s on purpose.)  Commercial Christmas is a consumerist push where businesses encourage us to buy products: presents, food, decorations, music, and on and on. Obviously, this is playing off of social Christmas, but it’s not the same thing. One is a social phenomenon; the other is a commercial one.

Nevertheless, these two combine and interact to various degrees. Social Christmas requires a certain level of commercialism, but the Christmas we’ve come to frown on is when the commercial element swallows up the social. Social Christmas is not at all a bad thing: in fact, it’s a very good one. Spending time with and showing our appreciation for the people we love—and for people who aren’t as fortunate—is a wonderful thing. It only becomes a bad one when it’s drowned out in the flashing lights, gift advertisements, and tacky Christmas music that’s only intended to make artist’s albums sell as much as they can.

So social Christmas is a very good thing—as long as it keeps commercialism in its place—but we have to keep in mind that it’s not the same as the other types. Let’s take a look at those.

2. Liturgical Christmas

This is the one we probably think of next after social Christmas. At a very simple level, it’s going to church on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth, singing some Christmas songs, and listening to your pastor’s reflection on the nativity scene. If the church you go to is protestant, that’s probably all you get. The Catholic liturgical Christmas is a little deeper than that: it’s an entire season of the liturgical year, spanning almost two months (including Advent and using the old calendar). It terms of surface-level liturgical elements, this means that the Mass readings and Propers are based around Christ’s birth, the priest’s vestments are white, the songs are from the Christmas section of the hymnal—and that créche gets brought up from the basement and put in front of the altar.

This is usually what we meant when we say “keep Christ in Christmas”—unless we’re also suggesting making your house decorations religious-themed. But, usually, we’re encouraging ourselves to remember that this is a celebration of when Christ came into the world, not a celebration of getting that really cool Star Wars LEGO set, and that we should go to Mass, participate in the liturgical movements of the Christmas season, and generally just keep Christ’s birth on our mind.

Well and good. But liturgical Christmas starts on the twenty-fifth, and social Christmas is almost over then—and without social Christmas, liturgical Christmas loses most of its push. It’s nice to go to Mass on Christmas, but when the church choir sings “O Holy Night” on January 4 . . . I mean, come on, Christmas is over. That “Holy Night” was ten days ago. And Christmas is over—social Christmas. Without social Christmas, we don’t give much meaning to liturgical Christmas, and that’s not really our fault, because the two blur together so much.

So social and liturgical Christmas are different things—but why does the Church have a whole month to celebrate something that happens in one day? Can’t it just have the celebration on the twenty-fifth—or the eight-day octave, fine—and then just be done with it? If liturgical Christmas was nothing more than créches and hymns, then that would make sense: it would coincide more with social Christmas. But those elements aren’t even uniquely Catholic (although that’s where they originated), and like I said before, they’re just surface elements that give evidence to something beneath.

This “something beneath” leads us into the third type. The liturgical season of Christmas doesn’t exist for its own sake: to discover why it does exist, we can look at the purpose of the liturgical calendar as a whole.

3. Spiritual Christmas

The liturgical calendar is a recurring sequence of “seasons” that annually celebrates and commemorates certain events and people in the life of the Church. But the seasons of the Church, unlike the seasons of the year, aren’t just things that happen because they happen. They exist to provide spiritual support for the lives of the faithful, and, to that end, they give a model for our spiritual lives.

Let’s break that down a bit. The Church’s calendar centrally focuses on alternating periods of penance and celebration (or a combination of the two). This was much more pronounced in ancient Catholic traditions: the bland “Ordinary Times” we have today were rolled into the celebratory seasons of Epiphany and Pentecost, and the calendar included short periods of penance before every single feast day—not just Christmas and Easter. We find remnants of this in the traditional vigil Mass of the feast of the Assumption, which is in violet, not white.

The reason why the calendar alternates between penance and celebration is so that it can provide a fruitful model for the spiritual life. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use Carmelite spiritual terminology. Generally speaking, there are two “phases” of the spiritual life: aridity and consolation. (Obviously, it’s more complex than this, but we’re not going to get into that.) Spiritual consolation is probably the one we’re most familiar with: it’s when we feel God “speaking to us,” when we get a taste of the rewards God has in store, and when we feel strengthened and refreshed by our prayer and spiritual exercises. Spiritual aridity, or “dryness,” on the other hand, is the opposite: it’s when we aren’t able to feel God’s presence, when our prayers seem tedious and fruitless, and when we want to give up on the spiritual progress we’ve made. While being far less pleasant, the Carmelite spiritual masters make it clear that aridity is the more fruitful phase: it teaches us to love God for God’s sake, not because God makes us feel good; it teaches us to pray for prayer’s sake, not because prayer makes us happy.

But, conversely, spiritual aridity allows us to see spiritual consolation for what it is, and to enjoy it more fully. This is where the liturgical calendar comes in. The calendar shows us by example that celebration of the gifts of the Church must be preceded by penance: just like there can’t be (true) consolation without aridity, there can’t be feasting without fasting.

With this in mind, let’s return to the season of Christmas. Liturgical Christmas is inseparable from liturgical Advent: together, the form that fast-feast duo we find across the calendar. But calling Advent a season of fasting is a little bit of a sigh topic. Does the Church really expect us to fast in the days leading up to Christmas? (Technically, it doesn’t, but it probably should.) The answer is yes: but nobody’s really going to skip meals and take cold showers—and if that was all we did, we’d probably be missing the point. Why? Just like the surface-level elements of the Christmas liturgy, the surface-level elements of the Advent liturgy (the somewhat nonexistent penance) are meant to manifest a deeper reality: Advent is a season that models spiritual aridity, where we’re meant to experience and meditate on the dryness of living in a fallen world that needs a savior. There’s no consolation in Advent; the whole point is to feel God’s absence. We go through this season in order to more fully experience the consolation of the Christmas season, where we celebrate God’s condescension into his creation.

Now we arrive at the final type: spiritual Christmas. Spiritual Christmas is a phase of the spiritual life in which we enjoy the consolation that comes from God’s presence in the world through the events of his Nativity and Epiphany. Consolation doesn’t come with aridity, and the consolation of Christmas doesn’t come without the aridity of Advent. Spiritual Christmas is related to, but distinct from, liturgical Christmas: the purpose of the latter is to allow us to enter into the former.

That’s all fine and good, but what does that really mean? How are we even supposed to experience this “consolation” after this vague “aridity”? And how does spiritual Christmas change our understanding of the other two types? Spiritual Christmas, as we’ve pointed out, is inextricably linked to our spiritual lives, and their primary manifestation and development is through prayer and meditation. So, during Advent, when we wake up in the morning and set aside time for prayer (which, hopefully, is something we do), we should take a moment to call to mind and internalize the reality that we live in a fallen world that is in dire need of being saved. And when Christmas comes around, we can use that same moment  (three or four minutes is probably enough) to similarly internalize the idea that God himself has entered his creation to bring it salvation through his presence, and, ideally, this overflows into our spiritual outlook beyond prayer. Bam. Spiritual Christmas, check.

But it’s important to understand that this type of Christmas isn’t the same as the other two. Where it’s connected to our spiritual life, the others are connected to our “liturgical” and social lives. Like we saw before with the liturgical-spiritual parallelism, our spiritual and liturgical lives should mirror and complement each other—and, in that sense, spiritual and liturgical Christmas should go together. But our spiritual and social lives do not mirror each other—at least not in the types of lives we live. When we merge these two types of Christmas in our minds, that’s when we start to see problems.

Let’s illustrate that. It’s the evening of the twenty-fifth or the morning of the twenty-sixth and you start to get that sense that all the fun is over—but then start feeling guilty because everyone in Catholic circles is saying “Christmas isn’t over yet!” But that feeling isn’t unfounded, because a certain type of Christmas is coming to a close. Social Christmas, depending on who we are, starts shortly after Thanksgiving and ends anywhere from Christmas night to the last New Year’s Eve Party. And then it’s done. That type of Christmas doesn’t extend to February 2, and it’s meaningless to try to make it just because we follow the Church’s calendar.

Some people say that attending Christmas parties during Advent is like attending Easter parties during Lent. But I’m going to make the bold claim that it’s okay to go to Christmas parties in Advent—because that’s when social Christmas is happening. What’s not okay is to celebrate spiritual Christmas during Advent: we can’t enjoy the spiritual consolations of a season when we’re supposed to be preparing for it with aridity. On the other end, it’s not okay to stop celebrating spiritual Christmas when social Christmas ends: the dinner parties are over, but that doesn’t mean we’ve exhausted the spiritual treasures that the Church has to offer through the arrival of God into creation. If we continue to mix up the spiritual and social elements of the holiday, we’ll only have a couple days—at most—to delve into the consolation of the season.

I’m writing this on January 1. Social Christmas is over—and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the real Christmas is just getting started.