Advent 2025, Epilogue: It’s Not About the Countdown

Advent is a deliberate, intentional time that moves mindfully between two ends of the time continuum: the past and what’s coming in the future. In the middle, we have right now, this moment. 

The Advent season, the holiday shopping season, and the advertisements actually do very little to celebrate. They are exploitative more than festive. The impact is ultimately the objectification of those of us who take in the advertisements, see all the decorations, and desire what is on sale. 

The advent calendar itself, if it’s not used carefully and intentionally, may very well be more about creating impossibly high expectations for the day of opening gifts, the family dinner, or really enjoying complex family relationships. The advent calendar is an invitation to pause each day and sit with truths about the past, the present, and our hopes for the future. 

The bigger they are, the harder they fall.  In the first world, our expectations are conditioned in childhood movies and ongoing advertising that communicate Christmas joy depends on the perfect gift, the lovely family dinner, or the satisfaction of a wish list. The countdown to the big day in the form of an Advent calendar is part of the problem.  It is a cute accomplice and another tchotchke to buy every year. Each day of the 24 days leading up to Christmas is another hit of processed sugar to simply rip open and consume.  How do we handle the post-Christmas disappointment as children? As young adults? As parents?  The letdown is extreme.  Do we simply watch football more? Return the sweater that is too big, small, or ugly? When do we put the decorations away?  

I admit, feels very cynical or even a bit grinchy to write this. It's hard to write this because it reminds me of the sadness I felt after so many Christmases. I had more winter break left before returning to school with no obligations, some new items to enjoy, but no guidance for my soul.  I would often feel low and move more slowly because I was on break.  I had no winter habits, just a sense of general disappointment, and, to make things, more time on my hands than nearly any other time of year, and no habit of returning to God.  I had no sense of how to enjoy God's presence, and no sense that I could be content just being.  I have been acculturated to a middle-class American experience of disappointing selfishness. Ironically, I felt this most acutely during the very season that celebrates the opposite of selfishness.

The anticipation and fear of the future is right now causing problems for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. As I understand it, Millennials are really struggling as they live in the present, worried and anxious about the future: They feel deeply the disappointment of how the world is, the job market, and the frustration of unfulfilled hopes. They had a vision as they entered the working world, and it’s not playing out, or at least not the way they thought it would.  The world and the job market have changed so rapidly. When Gen Y, aka Millennials, were young, mobile phone plans barely included any data, no free texts, and free nights and weekends were a cool perk.  Now, Social media and access to insane levels of information are normal. For Gen Xers and older, the time we live in feels unreal, and the constant downward gaze at the screen is otherworldly, but we are getting roped in, too.  App creators don't discriminate.  Neither do marketers. Influencers will take likes from anyone. The world doesn't want you to be grounded and present. Liturgies are for stuffy, religious boomers, and old folks who are befuddled by Snapchat, right?

It's not about the countdown to Christmas.  To live well in the twenty-first century, the Advent calendar, the Advent season, Christmas, and the several days following Christmas Day must be reclaimed wholly. Our winter days must be made holy. To restore substance to our holidays, we need a progression that anchors us—grounding ourselves in gratitude as the leaves fall, then transitioning into the new year through prayerful reflection and the search for a spiritual theme.  It's not about a countdown because a countdown so easily creates pressure, builds expectations to an impossible level, and minimizes the importance of each of the days we are counting down. The late fall and Advent are a time when the Northern hemisphere spends the most time per day in darkness.  It happens every year, despite the pretense of Daylight "Savings" Time. How do we live well in the growing darkness?

Attention. Candles. Breath. Prayer. Pausing more. Consuming less. Living liturgies. Building mindful habits. Savoring our food. Living in darkness requires attention.

We must reckon with facts.  We hate darkness. It has been an enemy for millennia in the lives of humans.  Darkness is fear. Darkness is unknown. Darkness is pre-creation chaos. We long for words that speak light into existence. On a soul level, every year darkness comes, and we kid ourselves, consuming hours of blue light on small screens to medicate a pain the blue light will never numb--the pain of passivity.  As is the whole Christmas holiday, the blue light is mostly fiction, based on truth. Christmas as we know it is as different 2000 years after Jesus' birth as the iPhone 17 is from the first iPod.  Christmas is commonly far from a celebration of Jesus and his mission to save the world in collaboration with his Father and the Holy Spirit. Christmas, as we know it, grew out of Saturnalia. Christ's birthday was layered onto preexisting celebrations involving trees and candles in response to humanity's discomfort with the dark.

Christmas, in the Western world, works against our gratitude and presence, even as the orbit around the sun is telling us to rest more.  The shorter days happen every year, and we try to medicate that truth.  God made nature reliable and cyclical, yet we want to push the limits of comfort and consumption daily.  We must sit with the truth--we can't sit still for five minutes per day, so how can we actually enjoy Advent as a matter of habit? How can meditating on the meaning of Jesus coming in the flesh, or silently sitting with themes of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love compete with the latest season of that great show on my video streaming platform that premieres right after Christmas?  How can gratitude flourish when Black Friday starts early at 5pm on Thursday? There is a set of facts we ignore to our peril. We must grapple with the facts so we might reclaim our attention and devotion.

Though we are made in the image of God, we also carry a sinful nature—two profound truths we rarely stop to reconcile. Because we so seldom consider the depth of our identity or our brokenness, we leave ourselves unguarded against an enemy who seeks only to steal, kill, and destroy. Our lack of contemplation becomes the enemy's greatest opportunity.

It's not about a countdown.  It's about winding down, letting our guard down.  It's about counting up examples of goodness, truth, and beauty.  These yearly moments of Thanksgiving, the longest nights of the year, Advent, and Epiphany are an opportunity.  Each is like a sunrise.  Every day is new, and every Advent season is another chance to practice gratitude, presence, contemplation, and simply being with God.  It is our chance to strip the season down to its essence. It is a wonderful time to sit with our souls' desires that no video, no wrapped present, and no family dinner could satisfy--the desire for the basic food groups of food for the soul--the desire for everlasting Hope, unending Peace in the world in and in my heart, Joy that is overflowing and reliable. And, of course, our souls' most essential food group, Love.  Unconditional, raw, uncut, self-giving love.  Every show is hinting at it, every movie tries to communicate it, but the love of God is so special that it deserves a yearly season in the darkest time of each year.  It's not about the countdown, it's about counting the ways I am loved individually, and the ways God loves the whole creation, from light to dark, to atmosphere and planets, to single-celled organisms to animals great and small, and, of course, humans, with our needy, hungry souls. 

So, as with nearly everything else in the world, we have to be incredibly careful when we grow out of childhood and start living our own lives to ensure that we are practicing presence. The vortex of regret and analysis of the past can cause problems that we medicate and avoid. 

Finally, Anticipation and Remaining 

The season of Advent is incredibly important. The season of Lent can be deeply formative. There is another season that I don’t even practice yet, nor am I very aware of how to celebrate it. It’s the season between Easter and Pentecost, seven weeks later. It is called Eastertide, Paschaltide, The Great 50 Days, or simply the Season of Pentecost. These are three central seasons to our spiritual formation. All three of them can be exploited, commercialized, and hijack our attention so that we’re being influenced by the Christmas sales, bunnies who lay eggs, and summer travel sales, rather than spiritually formed by Jesus’ way and truth and life. They can all easily be reduced to a handful of holidays. They can be reengineered to pressure us to spend and to be formed to an idea that a marketer values. That is so opposed to God’s intention. Let us be formed not by a countdown but a slowdown. Let us be formed by patterns of attention, appreciation and stillness.

If you have read this, I'm honored you took the time.  I'd love your comments below.