Some hope! Preparation, perhaps, in the form of doing our Christmas shopping, stuffing our Christmas turkey, wrapping our Christmas presents, rehearsing our Christmas carols, holding our staff Christmas parties, rehearsing our Nativity plays, posting our Christmas cards, admiring the Christmas decorations in the shops and in the streets. Some of us (the more religious) might even have friends round for drinks before going to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve! By the time most of us have finished "preparation", Christmas for us is over.
There is a lot to be said for joy and for the joyful anticipation of our Lord's nativity! The first Christmas was after all a time of almost unspoilt joy, darkened only by Herod's excesses, and by warnings which we gloss over when we read the Gospel narratives. (Remember how Simeon, when Mary brought Jesus to the Temple, told her that "a sword shall pierce your own heart also"?). But the Church's calendar waits until the sun has set on Christmas Eve before the joy bursts out.
The preparation in our formal readings and prayers during Advent is to remind us of God's coming among us - firstly in Creation, then in the promise of a Saviour, and then, at the end of time, in another coming, with the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. We need this time of preparation, and it is good that in our services of readings and carols, such as at the Heiliggeistkirche on the 19th, we tell the whole story of God's redemption, from the Garden of Eden up until the moment when "the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us."
Christmas itself starts on the 25th. The traditional song On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me A partridge in a pear tree, reminds us that it continues for twelve days. (Don't ask about the partridge or the pear tree - they may symbolize life, or they may be a confused transmogrification of something in Latin.) Without the song, we would have forgotten Christmas by day three. By day ten most of us are back at work anyway!
The second day of Christmas is the 26th - in English called Boxing Day (because of the custom of giving a box of presents to servants and employees - not to mention the postman, the newspaper boy, the dustman and the baker!). But for the church, it is St Stephen's Day. The day after we recall the birth of our Saviour, we commemorate the death of the first martyr - reminding us perhaps that Jesus came to challenge and to change the world - that the joy of acceptance needs to take account of the suffering of rejection.
On the 27th we celebrate John the Evangelist. And the 28th is the day on which we recall the Holy Innocents - the babies in Bethlehem whom Herod had slain in the vain hope of destroying the newly-born king.
We Anglicans do not normally commemorate St Sylvester, Bishop of Rome from 314 to 335 - an important time in the Church's history. And New Year's Day is an invention of the calendar makers - until 1751 in England (and 1599 in Scotland), people celebrated the new year on March 25th. In the Anglican Church's calendar, January 1st is the Feast of the Naming of Jesus - formerly called the Feast of the Circumcision. Its dual name reminds us of two things. Firstly that Jesus' parents fulfilled the Jewish law, by having him circumcised on the seventh day. But also that God, who in the Old Testament had a name that could not be pronounced, except by the High Priest once a year, now had a name like one of us - Jesus (or in Hebrew, Joshua) - God saves!
Which takes us to Twelfth Night - the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th. With the season of Epiphany, we turn our thoughts to Jesus being "shown forth" to the world, in his baptism in the Jordan, and also in the visit of the Magi - wise men from other cultures. Christmas at last is over. In the middle ages, Twelfth Night was a time for a final fling - revelries to mark the end of Christmas. May we share the same joy, as the herald angels sing glory to the new-born king.
HD