The liturgical year is separated into seasons, and each season has colors associated with it.  The different colors have different meanings, and they can be a simple and helpful visual reminder of the season.  

In Advent the main color is purple.  Purple is for royalty, and for penitence.  Royalty, of course, because we are waiting for the King of Kings.  Penitence because we are preparing for Him.  

A little bit of purple will go a long way in keeping you focused.  As we begin to decorate our homes for Christmas, it is easy to get lost in the celebratory atmosphere.  Use a bit visible purple to remind you what season it is.  Put a purple table cloth on the table, or use purple ribbons where you will use red on Christmas, like on that wreath on your door.  (It is easy enough to switch on Christmas!)  That way, when you come home from shopping in those painfully over-bright malls, or from work, where you listened to the already tedious carols on your coworker's radio all day, you refocus.  

This is a season for penitence.  This is a season to humble ourselves.  The King is coming!  

The people who walk in darkness have seen a great light!

I love fairy tales.  There are battles between good and evil.  There is beauty as beautiful as you can imagine, and terrifying ugliness.  (The movies always fall short don't they?  What animator can compete with the imagination of a child?)  There is magic and mystery.  Even when I know the end, the stories capture me.

Stories draw images which inspire and shape imagination.  Stories can command emotion or impart truth.

"The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; Upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone."  (Isaiah 9:1)

During advent we read these familiar prophesies in our preparation for Christmas.  It is easy to breeze through them.  We know them; we have heard them thousands of times.  We fancy that we understand them, since indeed Jesus came fulfilling the prophesies.

Can we imagine the longing of a people waiting for Christ?  Blindly wandering in the land of gloom, but trusting the Lord.  Their anticipation encouraged by the prophets.  Can we be those people?

Yearn for the Lord.

"As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God."  (Psalm 42:2)

You cannot appreciate, or even understand, a story if you skip to the end.  We know that Christmas is coming.  We know that Christ is coming.  Immerse yourself in hopeful anticipation.

The First Sunday of Advent: Happy New year!

In the Catholic Church, the liturgical year begins on the first Sunday of Advent.  Just as with the familiar holiday New Year's day, this is a time for reflection and renewal.  It is a time of waiting and preparing for Christmas and also for the second coming.

Preparations for Christmas are familiar.  Lights and trees are going up.  Greenery clings to mantles and banisters, to porches and front doors.  Ornaments of all kinds hang from every available protuberance.  Homes smell of rich candles and baking.  Cookie jars are full.  Parties, parties, parties!  Familiar carols reverberate through radios and minds.  Nativity displays are tenderly placed in prominent places.  Wonderful!  

Truly, I am not a grinch itching to steal these delights.  But what do they mean?  

These preparations mean nothing at all unless we are also preparing our hearts.  Christmas celebrates the incarnation; Jesus, our Lord, was born a man.  He humbled himself to be one of us.  He died, and rose from the dead.  He will come again.  We are preparing to celebrate this joyful anniversary of His birth.  He did not come for nothing.  He did not come so that we could throw a huge international birthday party for Him every year, though I am sure He likes a good party.  He came to bring us to him.  As we celebrate His birth we remember that He will come again and we must be ready.  

Thus, this is a season of repentance.  We hear the call of the baptist!  "Make straight the way of the Lord!"  (John 1:23)  We will!  We open our hearts.  We clear our minds of the mountains of meaningless clutter.  We recall and renounce our sins.

We pray:

Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you.  I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell, but most of all because they offend You, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love.  I firmly resolve, with the help of Your grace, to do penance and to sin no more.  Amen.

Thanksgiving is over. What now?

Every year as soon as Thanksgiving is over, and sometimes before, I start hearing people talking about the 'holiday season.'  This season begins on black Friday and ends on New Year's day.  It is a season of over-indulgence and commercialism.

Soon, there will be clamors from the masses to "Keep Christ in Christmas!"  It is a noisy argument every year between Christians who want public and reverent Christmas displays and atheists who want anything else.  It is the wrong argument.  For those who would like to recenter the holiday, the argument is not with the atheists who want control of public displays.  The argument is with the commercialism which would sap our homes and hearts of faithful celebration.

Black Friday, so named because companies (at least in theory) make a profit, has nothing to do with our Holy day.  If shoppers want good deals, and companies are offering them, then everyone can go home happy.  Shoppers laden with gifts and decor for the upcoming holiday can pat themselves on the back for saving pennies.  Black Friday is many things.  It is exciting!  It is not holy.  It is not a proper start to a season of holiness.  If we define our holidays around commercialism- and isn't that what we do when we choose black Friday as the start of the season- this is certainly more damaging to the true meaning of our holy day than cards and signs which wish us "Happy Holidays!"

Reclaim Christmas.  Not in the public square- someone else can fight that fight- but in your home.  Insist that this year, in this house, Christmas will be about celebrating the incarnation of our Lord.  That single impossibly glorious event which defines our faith in so many true ways will not get lost in senseless seas of green and red.  This year we will not celebrate the shopping season, even if we shop.  This year, with reverent hearts, we will observe Advent.