A happy Christmas to all our readers. You may think that this sentiment has somehow got displaced from the Christmas issue, but it is in fact appropriate to January. The 12 Days of Christmas start on Christmas Eve and carry on for 12 days – the ones immortalised with a partridge in a pear tree and the rest – culminating in the great feast of the Epiphany which our cartoon depicts in the coming of the three Magi to Bethlehem (well, nearly).
While secular society starts on the grim abstinence of Veganuary and Dry January, Christians should still be celebrating the rest of the feasts of Christmas with gusto. And the festivity doesn’t end there. As Gertrude Clark points out, the Christmas season carries on in a more modified way right through January until the feast of the Purification of the Virgin at Candlemas, on 2 February. This is what we might call Long Christmas – a gradual decrescendo in the festivities rather than an abrupt termination of them.
In other words, January is still part of the Christmas season. Psychologically and meteorologically, this makes complete sense. This is the bleakest time of the year, and without the festive season it can be very bleak indeed. It is certainly no time to be giving up meat or drink. This is just one respect in which the Christian year is now countercultural.
When secular society holds Christmas parties as early as November it is no wonder people have lost their festive mettle by New Year’s Day. The pre-Christmas period is, however, precisely the time when Christians should be preparing for the first and second coming of Christ. We should certainly not be giving good things up on New Year’s Day. Let’s save abstinence for the appropriate time, when the weather is more forgiving. Lent will be here soon enough.
