Its pretty constant from my 3yr old at the moment; "I want Christmas" ,"when is it Christmas?". To be fair, she has difficulty with waiting for the weekend too (who doesn't?!) but Advent does seem to stretch for a long time. Why is this? What is this all about?
Even those who don't celebrate Christmas as a Christian festival will often have Advent calendars as a count down for each day and for many hundreds of years, the church has marked the four Sundays before Christmas with an advent wreath, lighting a candle each Sunday. But it's not all just about waiting for presents!
Christmas didn't have a fixed celebration date for many hundreds of years. Eventually the Church decided to fix it around the Winter Solstice - maybe it made sense to celebrate Jesus coming as the light of the world at the darkest time of year. Advent started to be marked around the 5th Century but it wasn't just focused on Christmas.
The early tradition of Advent was that the Church would spend the first two weeks thinking about Jesus coming again and clearing out all the 'junk' from their lives and the second two weeks remembering the wonder of him coming into the world in the first place.
I was thinking about this the other day and stumbled on the phrase "to know where you're going, you need to know where you have been". It's something we often loose in our modern world where the idea is to get to your goal faster than the next person. There is something for us in the Early Christians taking time to look back as well as forward and to clean up their lives in preparation. Yes, it does seem like a long month but maybe it is a chance for us to take stock in what has been a truly topsy turvy year and to remember where we have come from and know that there will better coming.
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