Like Any Other Day

The older I get, the less magic Christmas seems to me. It becomes more and more an ordinary day with perhaps slightly more pomp or gatherings or hassle. There are a number of reasons for this personally in my life, mostly dealing with rotating family schedules that mean we “do” Christmas on some other day whenever we can get together, and so at times, Christmas really is just another day where nothing special happens.

Perhaps it is partially a function of expectation level. For example, when I was in 4^th or 5^th grade or so, I really caught on to the whole Santa thing and made lists of all the toys I wanted. I got none of them, and when this repeated itself year after year, it didn’t take too many years to get to the point where Santa was a fun novelty, but nothing special, certainly nothing real. I lowered my expectations and moved forward and stopped investing emotional energy into the elf, and learned to enjoy Santa for what he was, nothing more or less.

ADVENTures Before Christmas, Week 1

Much of the information came from the web, where it has been reposted many times, so I’m not sure of the original author, but the site used is http://www.crivoice.org/cyadvent.html

Advent means ‘coming,’ so it is the time of preparing for the coming of Christ. While it is most closely associated with Christmas and the celebration of Christ’s birth, for many Christians it is a reminder to anticipate and prepare for His second coming.

Interestingly, the original purpose of Advent was merely a countdown to Christmas, and that’s all. However, just as no modern evangelical pastor can conceive of a sermon that isn’t three points starting with the same letter, people expect everything in a ritual to be full of meaning to bursting, so meanings began to be assigned to various parts of the celebration. As a result of this ad hoc approach to liturgy, there is actually a lot of variation in both symbols and meanings, as you will see.