The Quest for Catholic Christmas

Amberlee Duteau

About the Author: Amberlee Duteau is a wife and homeschool mom who converted to the Catholic faith in 2016, and who currently resides in smalltown Alberta. When she’s not wrangling toddlers in the pews of her local Latin Mass, Amberlee enjoys writing, gardening, reading books with her husband, and perusing various corners of the Catholic blogosphere.

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It’s hardly original to reflect on the tension between secular Christmas and religious Christmas. Indeed, thanks to mid-November marketing creep and the instant evaporation of decor on December 26th, secular Christmas and Catholic Christmastide are literally almost two separate seasons. Each year, the penitential character of Advent is washed out by garish bright lights and a premature flood of holly jolly-ness. Tinsel, plastic trees, and banal commercial holiday music take over any public space their tendrils can reach. Though society remains vaguely aware it’s meant to be celebrating something more noble than shopping sprees, this sense is usually satiated by a handful of charity drives and invoking a nonspecific “Christmas spirit,” a generic benevolent impulse with ambiguous origins. To the pious Catholic, the modern Christmas landscape can be as grating as it is disheartening.

Year after year, this is the Yuletide terrain faced by the modern Catholic. As with all holy seasons, the traditionally-minded Catholic desires to commemorate Advent and Christmas in the ways Christians always have: with reflection and repentance, charity and cheer, so to celebrate and sanctify the season. Most such Catholics have also concluded, products of modernity that we are, that we’re often quite bad at it.

For starters, many of our habitual pre-Christmas plans clash with the somber, anticipatory nature of the Advent season. Catholic families find themselves diverting their focus from the Four Last Things to watch a Christmas parade or attend a party. Tonal clash and competing priorities can leave pious souls in a bind, especially if treasured community activities take place exclusively during Advent. Must we cloister ourselves from these premature displays of Christmas spirit? Should a good Catholic abstain from shindigs on Christmas Eve, even if one’s extended family has done Christmas Eve dinner for generations? We find ourselves weighing the penitential pros and cons, wondering whether to decline the endless list of pre-Christmas Christmas events we love.

In response to this dilemma, your fellow Advent respecters may suggest recreating these activities during the proper Twelve Days of Christmas. However, let’s be frank: after an entire month of Advent-as-Christmas followed by the main event, your local Catholic community is likely too burned out from “real” Christmas to revivify Christmastide in earnest. Their holiday reserves are utterly depleted. (Barring a slight second wind to celebrate New Year’s Eve; not too heartily, mind you, since we need to be in church New Year’s morning.)

All this isn’t even half of the holiday tug-of-war. Many an earnest Catholic, wistful and aspiring to the liturgical life, has stared at the family Christmas schedule with a sense of dissatisfaction. Is our celebration too commercialized and consumerist? Are certain holiday traditions too secular, too Protestant, too post-Enlightenment? Some of us pour over tomes of Church history or regional folk traditions, trying to discern the “correct” way to enjoy a proper traditional Christmas (taken to excess, this research process doesn’t feel very traditional either). We trip over our own feet trying to live up to our inheritance, often to the amusement of those who would accuse us of LARPing.

At points, one can wonder why we even bother. We scheme and scruple over a seemingly impossible task: to have wholesome traditions in a society whose only tradition is tradition’s rejection. We seek to meekly receive what’s been handed down through the centuries—while simultaneously rejecting the hand-me-downs of recent decades. (Naturally, this seeming futility isn’t exclusive to Christmas customs.) Is the true Catholic Christmas a mere phantom, a Platonic form forever out of reach?

Before we write off our quest as Sisyphean, however, we must reflect on (to borrow a trite phrase) the true reason for the season. Why do we care so deeply about the way we celebrate Christmas? What makes our souls yearn to make it maximally wholesome, joyous, and holy? The answer is both simple and clarifying: it’s love. Love for the innocent babe asleep in the manger of our hearts and imaginations. Awe at the Incarnational miracle that restores our dead world to life, one soul at a time. Joy at the mystery of salvation in our midst, as we draw closer with the season to that first Christmas day in Bethlehem. In our souls and in our Masses, we kneel before the Word of God made flesh. We love Him, and this love humbles us, as undeserving recipients of His eternal gift.

It’s this love that animates our desire to sanctify the Christmas season, and it’s this love we must learn to focus on instead of our shortcomings and limitations. Contemplating our love for Christ not only leads us to greater repentance and sorrow for sins, it also frees us to recognize the season’s pleasures as a symbol of God’s generosity. Instead of trying to optimize the rules of holiday engagement, we can learn to take what we’ve been handed, warts and all, and point it more perfectly towards the Object of our adoration. This loving cultivation doesn’t start and end with the Christmas season, though it’s a perfect time of year to embrace it more intentionally.

The more Christ’s love animates our souls and fills our households, the more His grace will transform our Christmas customs over time. This process won’t be instantaneous, and at times we must humbly accept lesser goods on the road to cultivating greater ones. That’s why instead of aiming to do things “right,” aim to do “more” instead: more penance, more alms, more of whatever religious or traditional trappings call to your soul. Advent can be made a little more reflective and penitential each year, even while accepting the practical or habitual limitations that clash with one’s pious aspirations. Maybe some of your seasonal celebrations can be rearranged to fall within the proper Christmas season; maybe they can’t be, at least not this year—but every year offers fresh graces and opportunities.

Rather than trying to recreate a Medieval village festival, consider the unique tastes and temperaments in your own household. What good and wholesome offerings can you provide that would appeal to them and raise their spirits? What activities would bring your children wonder and warm memories? Fill their hearts with delight and family fondness at Christmas, which in time will form into a mature joy and reverence for the Incarnation.

Piece by piece, we will reclaim and refine our homes and holy seasons, not unlike the way Christ gradually conforms our souls to Himself. In this way, we begin to honor Advent and Christmastide the way believers through the ages always have: by rejoicing in God’s goodness, and by growing in our desire to love and glorify him with each passing season.

Here on the ground, many of us will continue putting up our Christmas decorations a month after everyone else on the block and taking them down a whole month later. We’ll curate our Christmas playlists on Spotify to make a jolly time of it when the proper date comes. (The carols and classics are better than the radio stuff anyways.) We’ll put out our Nativity sets (hold the wisemen till Epiphany) and place a tasteful Advent wreath on the dining room table, declining to quibble about the latter’s historic origins. We’ll pray and give alms as we anticipate Christ’s coming. We’ll give gifts and enjoy good things with those we love, commemorating together the greatest Gift of all. Most importantly, we’ll keep the “Mass” in Christmas, thanking God and imploring him to fill us with His Spirit. Unlike the ephemeral Christmas spirit, this Spirit remains with us through the Christmas season and beyond.