The time before Christmas is called Advent, meaning ‘coming’ or ‘waiting’ in the language of the church. It is the first four weeks of the church year, in many ways with similarities to Ramadan before Eid ul Fitr. Earlier, some Christians would observe fast during Advent, although the longer fast in the church year comes in March and April. Today, few would fast during Advent and hold quiet reflective sessions. Advent is rather a busy time with preparations for Christmas, which is the major feast in the church calendar. Advent and Christmas come at the end of the year with business implications for the private and government sectors, civil society and people’s private life. It may include auditing of accounts and planning of the coming year.
Advent is a religious time with attention given to the weekly Sunday service with lighting of candles, one new one for each of the four Sundays of Advent, and with extra time for children’s activities and the making of home-made Christmas decorations. In my childhood time in Norway more than fifty years ago, the Christmas tree was not brought into the house until Christmas Eve, or a day or two earlier, decorated with electric lights, shiny bulbs and children’s homemade items. Today, the Christmas tree is usually brought into the sitting room weeks before Christmas, and most of the Advent time looks almost like the actual Christmas. This may have happened to some extent because of American influence, where the time from Thanksgiving at the end of November is in many ways a Christmas time. But in America, Christmas ends quickly after the actual Christmas Day on 25 December and the Second Christmas Day, or Boxing Day, as it is called in the UK, on 26 December. In Europe and elsewhere, it is a longer festive season all the way up to the 13th Day of Christmas on 6 January. In Sweden, it is even a public holiday. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, using the older Julian calendar, Christmas falls a week’s time later than in most other countries, now using the Gregorian calendar.
New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are also important parts of the holiday season, perhaps not with religious content, but with more formal parties, family dinners and sometimes dance parties. Many attend midnight service on New Year’s Eve, especially Catholics, and the main service in the morning on New Year’s Day. On the days between the Christmas and the New Year days, it is common to have various types of Christmas parties, some organised by local community organisations or school-related parents’ groups, with the singing of Christmas carols and walking around the Christmas tree. Families with large enough space in their homes would hold late afternoon parties for children, who are off from school, but also with adults included, and everyone would be in party mood, and many workplaces only open in the morning.
Different types of games and ‘who knows most’ Q and A competitions are common at parties, and efforts are made to make the gatherings cheerful and informal, which stands in some contrast to the quite formal church-related events. We should not forget that Christmas events, like other religious events, are for families and relatives to come together and keep up festive food traditions. It is seen as important also to include more distant relatives and friends who for financial or health reasons cannot attend many gatherings, or who live alone. Relatives in old people’s homes must be visited, or collected by car for comfortable transport to attend events, so that they do not just sit alone and watch TV and listen to concerts and other seasonal programmes on the radio, and perhaps even reading printed newspapers. Special Christmas magazines, for children and adults, have become old-fashioned and are hardly published any longer.
The tradition with a decorated pine tree for Christmas, or nowadays a plastic tree, in every home, office and restaurant, which we now find almost compulsory in the West and other countries, is not a very old tradition. Well, it started in South Germany in the 15th and 16th hundreds, and spread to other countries, and became a fashion from the 1870s and 1880s, first in the upper and middle classes and then for everyone. The tradition of sending handwritten Christmas cards, with traditional snowy winter scenes, became common, peaking in the 1920s and 1930s, but is now getting outdated. Instead, we send email or SMS messages to each other, or make phone calls, with good wishes for the season. The tradition of giving and receiving Christmas gifts, which many children and youth probably find the most essential part of the whole event, became common in the mid 1800s, but before that it was sometimes used for New Year. It took off with the expansion of capitalism and commercialisation, and when people got more disposable income, and it is certainly not likely to decline any time soon.
In Norway, they expect that the money people will spend in December this year for gifts, new clothes, food, travels, mobile phones, sports gear and more, will be record high, in spite of people also complaining about economic constraints. Well, it is the three quarters who are well off who spend money, and the lower quarter are left outside the mainstream. Many countries in Europe and beyond are harder hit economically than Norway, whose large oil and gas exports contribute significantly to their economy, indeed now when Europe has major restrictions on import of oil and gas from Russia after its full invasion of Ukraine almost four years ago.
In a recent debate programme on SVT, the Swedish public broadcasting, the leader of the largest political party, the Social Democrats on the left of the political divide, Magdalena Andersson, and the leader of the second largest party, the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson, on the far right, agreed on few things, but they did agree on one big issue: they said that the most important Christmas and New Year wish is that the Russian war in Ukraine comes to an end. Alas, as it stands now, a miracle must happen for that wish to come true. But then, Christmas is a miracle season if we believe in the Biblical Christmas story, as Christians and also Muslims do, at least in the broad aspects of it. And then, in the midst of Advent, the Swedes, and some other Christian believers and cultural Christians, celebrate the Day of Sankta Lucia (Saint Lucy) on 13 December, a beautiful event for children and youth with peace wishes expressed in songs and poems performed by young girls, and nowadays also boys, carrying candles while walking in a procession and standing on stage in front of proud parents and friends.
Let me end my article today agreeing with the Swedish politicians’ wish for peace in Ukraine, and further hopes for peace on earth, as is indeed the Christmas message, recently also underlined through the Pope’s journey of peace and inter-faith to Trkiye and Lebanon. Let us remind each other that miracles only happen through people’s actions, it is we who are the implementers of God’s will. And it is true that we human beings have mismanaged so many things in the world, indeed for poor people and the environment, that miracles are needed to correct the wrongs. Believers in all religions, and others too, must commit to cooperate in doing God’s will, during Advent, Christmas and all other days of this year and the coming years.
Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).
