Journeys 11-26-06

Journeys 11-26-06

Only 29 days until Christmas! By now, the pies are all gone and all that’s left of the turkey is the dark meat. You can only re-heat the dressing so many times unless you really do like the blackened crusty stuff at the bottom of the pan. By now, most of those related have headed home. There is that old olfactory wisdom about fish and relatives after three days.

We are in the rarest of years. This year, there is this gap; a full week between Thanksgiving and the beginning of Advent. This also means that Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday. Even though the retail world now shifts directly from Halloween to Christmas with a just spattering of Thanksgiving, the church doesn’t begin its Advent countdown until the first Sunday in December. The church also has this distant memory that the season of Christmas starts Christmas Day and goes for 12 days until Epiphany.

The reality of our culture is that the Christmas race started at 5 a.m. the morning after Thanksgiving. To finish the race you have to get the house decorated, the tree up, the presents bought and wrapped, and the family herded together for the 2-20 minute Christmas Day moment when the presents are unwrapped. Once the Christmas moment has been visually recorded, we then enter the season of returns, (the week between Christmas and New Years). After New Year’s Day and the 2-3 day spill over of the College Football Bowl Season, we return to regular time until Super Bowl Sunday which is now in February due to the need for greater Neilson ratings at that time of year.

My advice would be to take advantage of this extra week. Rest up. Take extra naps. Conserve electricity. Stay off ladders. Eat only what’s left over from Thanksgiving. Spend extra time in prayer and meditation. Resist all catalogs and commercials. We’ll call this week the season of “Race Preparation,” or, “Pre-Advent,” or maybe, “Christmas Prior.”

God be with us in this calm before the storm.

Grace & Peace,