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It has been a while since I've added an entry to this "web log" or "Blog."
Perhaps like you the "Holiday Season" has taken up my energy both physical and spiritual.
The tag-line of this entry is my theme today. In yesterday's bulletin (available on this website) I printed an article by the commentator Joseph Bottums about Advent and Christmas. He made a point that I think is well worth emphasizing: that the "world" has got the whole "Holiday season" backwards.
Instead of "waiting" for Christmas in Advent; and then "keeping Christmas" to use the rich old English phrase; we turn Advent into "the Christmas rush" and then collapse in a heap on Christmas Day. The radio stations than have been playing various Christmas and generic "Holiday" music for weeks will switch back to their regular programming on December 26th. We are constantly urged to wallow in sentimental nostalgia of "just like the way it used to be..." and sigh for real (or imagined) idyllic childhood Christmases of our past. The one thing we can wind up not doing is to actually "keep" or celebrate Christmas TODAY as it is; not as it "was".
Our American culture ( with its historically low-Church Protestant and Masonic tone) does not understand Liturgical Catholicism. The "Twelve Days of Christmas" are not just the subject of a famously quirky jolly song ( which might actually be a coded Catholic song in a persecuting Protestant England centuries ago) but the actual span of the Catholic Church's observance of the Christmas Octave and days leading up to January 6th, "Little Christmas", the Feast of the Epiphany.
(I have to say here that the Church herself,at least in the US, hasn't helped by moving the Epiphany, one of the oldest feasts of the Catholic and Orthodox liturgical calendars, to the nearest Sunday and not keeping it on its proper date: January 6, Twelfth Night. Typical pragmatism: not the best feature of our American genius, in my opinion.)
No wonder we feel tired, flustered, and ,often enough, melancholic on Christmas Day and immediately after.
We've got it all 180 degrees off course.
While we enjoy the (so-called) Christmas movies ( Holiday Inn, It's a Wonderful Life, Christmas Story, A Christmas Carol, Miracle on 34th Street..etc..) dwell upon the past; and most often never mention Jesus or His Birth; we have something much better: the real thing.
And we can have that real thing whether we are old, young, rich, poor, happy or sad.
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