The Case For Advent-Maxxing

It is a truth universally acknowledged (by all right-thinking people, anyway) that Christmas comes too early. First you have the people who hoist up their wreaths and garlands at the first sign of falling leaves—a practice which should, in my opinion, be punishable by immediate deportation. I don’t care if you’re a legal citizen. The spirit of Project 2025 surely demands that we send October hall-deckers back to whichever country their ancestors most recently arrived from. Boughs of holly, gay apparel, and so forth become permissible at exactly the moment when Santa Claus reaches Herald Square in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. This was decided at the Council of Chalcedon.

But even then, December 25 is surely a demoralizing choice of dates for the pinnacle of all jollities. The excitement ramps up to a maximum just as the days are starting to droop into their coldest and darkest. This is a bright consolation for the feeling that you are looking at the sun from an increasingly unflattering angle. But then Boxing Day hits like a hangover on December 26 when, in the words of an extraordinarily depressing and mawkish poem by civil rights leader Howard Thurman, “the star in the sky is gone” and “the kings and princes are home.”

Thurman somehow meant this to be inspiring, but it’s obviously a galactic let-down. Here you are, your yearly allotment of cheer utterly spent, and there now stretch before you two months of slush and darkness with nothing to punctuate the tedium but New Year’s resolutions and Valentine’s Day. So the only activities scheduled to leaven the winter doldrums in our modern system are setting homework assignments for yourself and grappling with the crushing fear that you might die alone. Nice going, everyone.

Our ancestors knew better. What if I told you December 25 could be not the punishing end, but the gleeful start of the festivities? “The Twelve Days of Christmas” isn’t just the wish-list of an eccentric and high-maintenance wifejak. It’s a picture of how the season ought to be. Instead of dutifully pledging to obsess over hydration come January, you could be cavorting merrily among a retinue of milkmaids and an assortment of waterfowl. Or at least you could leave your Christmas lights up without remorse.

All this and more can be ours if we simply ditch the secular falderal and refer back to the liturgical calendar. Christmas would then last until January 6—which is not the Solemnity of the Insurrection but the Feast of the Epiphany, commemorating the wise men’s visit to the manger. The kings and princes are not home come New Year’s, thanks very much, they are just getting started—as we should be. By some accounts the Christmas season extends all the way to “Candlemas” on February 2, which commemorates the presentation of the baby Jesus in the temple according to Jewish rite. That would make Christmas 40 days long, rivaling the 50 days of “Eastertide” to celebrate the resurrection.

But just as the exuberance of Easter is preceded by the 40 somber days of Lent, the 40 days of Christmas are preceded by days of preparation known as Advent. This is the key to understanding the rhythm of the whole liturgical calendar: it goes through successive periods of grief and joy, silence and music, death and resurrection. It takes the natural ebb and flow of the light throughout the year as raw material in a grand work of art, using the solar system itself to construct a symbolic picture of Jesus’ life. In Genesis, when God sets up the stars as “signs to mark the seasons,” the rhythm of the year becomes a language for conveying the order of creation. The Jewish calendar, pinned to the cycles of the moon, established the pattern. The Christian calendar, founded on the schedule of Jewish feasts that Christ observed, grows out of it.

The winter solstice, when the daylight becomes shortest, makes for a natural beginning to this yearly sequence. Unlike Easter, which took place firmly during the festival of Passover, Christmas isn’t identified with a specific date in the Bible. Many people now think Jesus was born sometime in the Spring. But the winter date was fixed already by the 4th century A.D. St. Augustine of Hippo loved to preach about the symbolic appropriateness of December 25th as an entry point for God into the world, precisely because of the dark and the cold: “He, therefore, who bent low and lifted us up chose the shortest day, yet the one whence light begins to increase.” As the day wanes to its lowest ebb and the year rolls into its most brooding silence, the light of the world slips in and begins to grow.

This is deep and ancient magic. Every people and tribe has long since recognized that the earth wheels through a cycle of death and rebirth. Christians saw in their lord and savior the answer to a promise whispered through the very structure of creation, written in the very bones of the year. This is why it remains hilarious when detractors, as they have done since antiquity, accuse Christians of “appropriating” or imitating pagan rituals. The obvious answer to this is that yes, of course—in Christ we behold the fullness of a reality only dimly glimpsed in the nature worship of old. All the pageantry of myth and legend points at last to the greatest story ever told, and told again each year.

Hence the season of Advent, a period of waiting and watching as the world grows dark. It covers the four weeks before Christmas, each one of which is dedicated to a different element of the story—the hope of the prophets, the peace of Bethlehem, the joy of the shepherds, the love of the angels. Shortly after St. Martin of Tours ripped his cloak and gave half to a beggar on a cold winter day, the season became associated in France with alms and fasting. Now most churches keep some form of the ritual. Creation itself holds its breath, and mankind awaits the adventus, the arrival, of a transforming light.

Not that you can’t play Christmas music in December. But you’ll get more out of the season if you spend part of it in contemplation, reading, and prayer. The world winds down this month in anticipation of a rebirth that comes just when creation feels most exhausted, its natural powers and energies spent. At that moment an all but invisible gap opens in the machinery of things, and there enters—unseen by the government sentries prowling the city streets, undreamt of in the palaces of emperors—the light and the lord of the world. At which point, the party’s on.

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Spencer A. Klavan is host of the Young Heretics podcast and author, most recently, of Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith. The associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books, he has written for many outlets, including The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, City Journal, Newsweek, The Federalist, The American Mind, and The Daily Wire. Follow him on X: @SpencerKlavan. You find his daily Advent posts on Substack at and read further theological reflections at The New Jerusalem, where he writes alongside his father, novelist Andrew Klavan.