Happy Boxing Day
Blessed St. Stephen's Day, the Second Day of the Nativity of Our Lord, the Synaxis of the Theotokos, the feast of Her Wonder-working Icon of the Gate of Dawn, and the 2nd of the Twelve Days of Christmas! If that’s too complicated, Happy Boxing Day.
The last fifty hours have been pretty full at St. Patrick's Orthodox Church. We had two Christmas Eve Masses (this is one of the only days in the church calendar where the Bishop grants a special dispensation to have Mass twice), the second one being the nighttime Mass that began at 10:00 pm. After the candle-lit Mass finished, we broke our fast with a church party, and I was the last to leave early Christmas morning. The early risers in our parish celebrated the dawn Mass at 6:00 am, while the whole church gathered again at 10:00 AM for another celebration of the Christmas Mass, followed by various festivities in the home.
My children are all grown up and live in different states, so spending Christmas with them this year was not possible, but I had four different invitations from other families, so it was a rich afternoon even without my family near.
I woke up this morning pretty tired so I’m ashamed to say I didn’t attend the St. Stephen’s Mass. I hoped to have a quiet day at home, phone all of my children, and catch up on some admin. But in the end, I had to come into town because I discovered I accidently left the power cord for my laptop at the Bealeton Starbucks.
When I arrived at the Starbucks, I set up my computer to do some work. The barista recognized me as the one who had asked them to play Christmas music two days earlier, so she said, “I’ll switch to our Christmas playlist for you.” A few minutes later she apologized and explained that Starbucks had removed the Christmas playlist, replacing it with a New Years one. She did not have the equipment or authority to override this decision that had been made at the corporate level.
I am always amazed at how the worldly mind (now enforced through corporate norms) rigidly terminates Christmas at 12:01 AM on St. Stephen's Day. If I continue wearing my Christmas hat through the Twelve Days of Christmas, let alone until the season officially ends with Candlemas, I often find myself the but of remarks like, “Still trying to hold onto the Holiday season, are you?” or “you must be making up for starting Christmas late this year?”
Thankfully most people are familiar with the song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” so I’m able to reference that when explaining how traditionally Christmas extends through Twelfth Night on January 5, the eve of Epiphany. When my children were still at home, we opened the last of the gifts on the eve of Epiphany, or Theophany as it’s called in the Byzantine tradition. At St. Patrick’s we observe the Christmas season all the way until Candlemas on February 2. Most people, when you explain all that, think that’s a neat tradition, and it opens up space for a discussion about the church calendar and the Orthodox-Catholic tradition.
What is more difficult is the hostility against Advent (or the Nativity Fast, as they call it in the East) in the run-up to Christmas. Earlier today my friend Alex Taylor remarked how bizarrely touchy many people (even Christians) get about the concept of Advent.
“When you hold off celebration, parties, feasts, Christmas carols, decorations, until the Feast itself actually arrives,” he said, “many people get offended. What the %£# is wrong with you, you horrible grinch?! What have you got against celebrations and Christmas cheer? Why do you hate fun? Who hurt you?”
Taylor went onto explained how, “at this point in my life (having been in the Orthodox Church since 2008, so practically my entire adult life), celebrating Christmas without the preparation of Advent is unimaginable to me. Advent is perhaps my favourite season of the whole Church year.”
I agree with Taylor. I spent the final day of the Advent feast, namely Christmas Eve, waiting. Between the morning Christmas Eve Mass and our Midnight Mass, I didn’t want to drive back home and so I stayed in the Bealeton area waiting. The library was shut, so I did a few hours work at Starbucks (inadvertently leaving my chord, as already mentioned), went for a walk at Whitney State Forest, and then sat in the car to continue waiting. While waiting I listened to Handel’s Messiah, did my pre-Communion prayers, and just sat waiting.
Maybe that sounds like a boring way to spend the evening before Christmas, but waiting is a very appropriate thing to do on Christmas eve, the culmination of a whole season of waiting. (And, to be fair, I didn’t always find the waiting easy - hence asking them to play Christmas music at Starbucks.) Even as many modern Christians only have a vague sense that Christmas begins (and doesn’t end) on December 25th, thanks to the continued cache of the hymn “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” so many modern Christians have a vague remembrance that Advent is a time of waiting, thanks to the continued cache of the hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”
For many modern Americans, however, this remembrance can be especially vague, and this is due largely to the Puritan legacy. The puritans did their best to eradicate the church calendar from national memory, and Christmas was only recognized as a national holiday in 1870. I tell the story of this in my book Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics.
The passage I’m about to share was written from the perspective of Byzantine Orthodox, whereas earlier in this article I used the vocabulary appropriate for the Western Rite, so don’t let that confuse you. Also, don’t be triggered by the absence of footnotes. This passage is scrupulously referenced, but for that you will need to buy book.
Sadly, many modern Christians are unfamiliar with the rhythm of the church year; they tend to think...that Christmas ends rather than begins on December 25... Why is this? Part of it goes back to the origins of Protestantism. The French Reformer John Calvin urged doing away with Christmas and all other feasts in the cities where he preached. In one letter he denounced Christian holidays as unprofitable because they were full of superstition and abuse. In Geneva he reluctantly observed Christian holidays because the magistrates ordered him to do so. But he had interesting ways of practicing the observance: in 1536, he and William Farel spent Easter Sunday on the beach of Lake Geneva, excommunicating the entire town since the magistrates refused to give the power of judicial excommunication to Calvin per the stipulations in The Book of Church Order.
Calvin’s ideas were formative for the Puritans who helped shape the religious imagination of the United States. In its Directory for the Public Worship of God, the Westminster Assembly prohibited holidays, making clear that “there is no day commanded in scripture to be kept holy under the gospel but the Lord’s Day, which is the Christian Sabbath. Festival days, vulgarly called ‘Holy-days,’ having no warrant in the Word of God, are not to be continued.”
We get an idea how much the Puritans opposed these holidays from the fact that when Oliver Cromwell turned England into a Puritan commonwealth, he instructed his leaders to make Christmas day an obligatory work day. Cromwell’s “troops roamed the streets looking for signs of inappropriate feasting: mince pies and plum puddings were seized.”
America’s strong Puritan heritage, brought to the United States by the Pilgrim fathers as well as the hundreds of thousands of Scotch-Irish who immigrated during the eighteenth century, sought to enforce these measures with what some have called “calendary iconoclasm.” These Celtic immigrants, mostly from Presbyterian and dissenting backgrounds, were heirs of a Protestantism that had little time for rituals, ceremonies, or times and seasons, which they considered remnants of popery. By eradicating the church year and all Christian holidays, the Puritans and their descendants left a vacuum that a nonreligious ordering of time has ultimately filled, which has helped reinforce the idea that a secular world exists and functions separately from spiritual categories. When they rejected the church year as a legitimate way to tell the story of redemption, the Puritans and their descendants inadvertently underscored the sense that religion is disembodied, detached from the space-time continuum. This would ultimately reinforce a number of dualisms that emerged in North American culture, including a false dichotomy between the sacred and the secular.
This process of reordering the world and time often entailed the migration of the sacred from the religious to the political and to landmarks denoting the achievements of civic nationalism. These migrations had begun to occur in Calvin’s own lifetime: significantly, while St. Peter’s in Geneva was whitewashed to remove all religious imagery, a new stained-glass window was installed to display the arms of the city.
Because human beings are inescapably liturgical and religious, we invariably organize the year into rhythmic structures that reflect our priorities. If our priorities are not the great feasts of the Church, then by default we most likely structure our year around secular holidays that tell the story of political redemption or else holidays that pay homage to the god of hedonism. And this is exactly what has happened. “One by one, the Church’s holy days have been overshadowed by secularizing forces, by new false gods,” wrote Fr. Scott Wilson for Touchstone. He continued, “It is striking that nearly every major feast day in the church year has been preempted, to one degree or another, by a secular event that now absorbs the greater part of public attention.” Father Scott pointed to many examples of this, not least the way spring break has hijacked Easter break: “Even in public school systems, the weeklong break that occurs in the spring used to be called the ‘Easter break.’ No more; it is now just called ‘spring break.’ And while it often coincides with Holy Week, the solemn week culminating with Good Friday, when our Lord’s Passion is commemorated, many people use the break to skip town and head to warm climates for festive activities, in a recess from daily and academic grinds.”
Perhaps the saddest casualty in these secularizing shifts is the churchless Christmas so familiar to most American Christians. As church has ceased to be central to the celebration of Christmas, the sacred quality of Christmas has migrated to merchandise, hedonism, and sentimentalism, all of which many Americans now treat like surrogate gods. This hit me when I moved back to America after living in England for ten years. In England, church attendance on Christmas morning is as much a part of the celebrations as stockings, mince pies, and carols. In fact, many English men and women who hardly ever set foot inside a church attend their local Anglican church on Christmas morning. Indeed, walking to the village church on Christmas morning, accompanied by the festive music of the church’s bells, is such an integral part of an English Christmas that when we moved to America, I found it difficult to imagine Christmas morning any other way. I found it disconcerting that most American Protestants think of their churchless Christmases as normal. Yet before it was anything else, Christmas was a Mass of the church (Christ-Mass) and only pagans would have skipped out on the occasion.
Eastern Orthodox churches have preserved many of the ancient traditions of Christmas, which they call “Nativity.” They celebrate the Feast of the Nativity with the Festal Orthros, filled with a glorious hymnody and festal readings associated with the feast. The festal Matins pageantry builds up to the celebration of the Festal Liturgy of St. Basil, which the Church only celebrates a few times each year (rather than the shorter Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom the Church normally celebrates on Sundays). The Festal Liturgy of St. Basil typically begins late on Christmas Eve, so the worshipers greet Christ’s birth with a Eucharist early Christmas morning.
For the forty days leading up to the Feast of the Nativity, Eastern Orthodox Christians undertake a Nativity Fast, abstaining from all meat and dairy products in preparation for the birth of the Christ child in Bethlehem.
Christmas, like the Church’s other great fasts and feasts, is the Church’s ultimate anti-Gnostic statement, for it proclaims that time itself has become the medium of our redemption. Consider that within the drama of linear time, the cycles of the moon and stars repeat to mark recurring seasons, and these help us organize ourselves according to repeating days, weeks, months, seasons. These cyclical rhythms pull history forward in a way comparable to how the hands of a clock rotate within the context of larger rhythms of forward movement (hours, days, years). The Incarnation has sanctified this linear flowing of time, while once it was only the medium of corruption. Time itself has been caught up into the repeating cycles of the liturgical calendar—Annunciation, Nativity, Theophany, Lent, Pascha, etcetera—through which history is pulled forward in the ongoing progress toward the final eschaton. These holidays proclaim that the linear flow of time does not simply bring more futility but ushers in further mysteries of God’s creative work, moving us from part to fullness, from shadow to reality. This redemptive-historical drama of time will reach final completion at God’s glorious appearing, when He will judge unrighteousness and complete the process of sanctifying time and space.
Further Reading