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One of my favourite UnHerd articles of 2018 was Polly Mackenzie on the meaning of Advent. Though not a religious believer, she provided a better explanation of the purpose of the season – and its distortion by contemporary capitalism – than I’ve heard in a lifetime of church attendance:
“What an age we live in. Our culture has subverted and corrupted a festival – Advent – about patient waiting and anticipation. It’s turned it into one that involves indulging ourselves into a coma of mindless consumption the moment we lift our heads from the pillow.”
Advent used to be a time of fasting (and still is in Orthodox Christianity). However, we’ve turned it into an extended pre-Christmas Christmas blow-out – short on spiritual significance; long on shopping, eating and drinking.
The result is that we’ve spoiled Christmas itself – by which I don’t just mean Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but what used to be celebrated as the Twelve Days of Christmas. Most of those have gone out the window – Boxing Day has slipped into an exhausted, alcoholic stupor; the less said about New Year’s Eve the better; and as for Twelfth Night and the Feast of the Epiphany, forget it (as indeed most of us have).
We do mark a new solemnity, however – the Expulsion of the Christmas Trees, in which desiccated firs compete with overflowing wheelie bins for pavement space. Other Christmas decorations, if not thrown away, are packed away – the halls comprehensively undecked in readiness for the secular counterweight to the secularised Advent – a season not of preparation, but of regret. Welcome to ‘Dry January’ or, as it is alternatively known in the gym trade, ‘Sweaty January’.
Goodness knows that our livers, waistbands and bank balances need the break – but, unfortunately, it comes at just the wrong time of year. Winter after Christmas is a different beast to Winter before it – an altogether more vicious one. If ever there were a time of the year not to bring the cheer of Christmas to a harsh and premature halt, it is this one. And yet we do so because the modern world is almost as detached from the natural cycle of seasons as it is from the Christian calendar.
We may think we’re familiar with the ‘traditional’ four seasons of Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn – and the shifts that mark the transition from one to the next – but, insulated within our bubbles of artificial light and warmth, we’re really not. In fact we can’t even agree among ourselves when each season starts.
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