Evolving Advent

Advent has had a varied history. Sometimes in some places it's been a 40 day preparation season a bit like Lent. Sometimes it's been about a week. At some point it started to be thought of as the Church's new year. At some point it gained in the West the form of a 4 Sundays before Christmas season of preparation -with the penitential feel that tended to go along with Lent. The idea was that Christmas began on the night before Christmas day. I won't go into the details, there's Wikipedia for that!
However, it seems to me that it is difficult for the season to be kept in that way in the contemporary west without is being seen as killjoys and legalists. This is because in the popular psyche, Christmas begins before 25 December -which is felt to be the culmination of the feast. As a child, I can remember thinking that the 12 days of Christmas were the previous 12 days not the following ones. That was logical: you'd end up on the most important day with the most gifts!

So, as I have written before, I think we should re-configure how we approach (metaphorically and chronologically) Christmas. Now might be a time to start sketching out ideas as we go through things this year with a view to beginning to change things next time around

Suggestion the first. Let's start the preparation sooner. I'd suggest after remembrance tide; so about two weeks into November -this would roughly coincide with a Celtic Advent which was 40 days prior to the Nativity. However, I'd suggest that the preparation season be staged and take account of the new Kingdom season -which is essentially November, ending with the final Sunday of November (Christ the King). I'd suggest that from mid November to mid December a time of relative fasting be considered -perhaps in the style of Muslim Ramadan where some feasting is woven in and then a couple of weeks before Christmas this would ease off.

Suggestion the second. Some marking and staging of the preparatory weeks: Lets have an Advent wreath of seven or eight candles, each to be lit on each Sunday progressively (there are those menorah-like candle-stands from Scandinavia, perhaps, to draft into service, eh?). And this might enable us to fix a current problem with the four/five Advent candles thing: the 'traditional' themes of the candles don't fit the lectionary readings for their respective Sundays. So we could do with a rethink of that, probably by tying in the candles to the respective Sunday themes -and writing prayers and little songs to fit that. For much of the Church of England this candle-lighting stuff is only about a generation old anyway: it hardly counts as hoary tradition, in reality and we have no canonical oughtage driving this: it's purely churches liking to 'beef up' the seasonality (perhaps responding to the Advent calendar's popularity). So let's take back control from unthinking antiquarianism and make the nice little liturgical additions serve well rather than pulling in another direction.

Suggestion the third. Liturgical colours. Let's face it, the use of red for Kingdomtide is more about differentiating from Advent which was using purple when in fact Kingdomtide's themes would more naturally lend themselves to purple (or black even). So how about, by recognising the increasingly 'feasty' nature of things as December progresses, we perhaps started to use red in Advent, or perhaps the last couple of weeks before Christmas day? That would free us up to use purple in November. Maybe we might even stage things like this: black for the first couple of weeks of November; purple next and finally in the last run up to Christmas, red. Perhaps we might fancy returning to using blue like used to happen before Roman canonical conformity interfered: Black>blue>purple (imperial colour for Christ the King?)>red. Maybe we could colour our candles accordingly?