Twelve Days of Christmas
So, most of us have heard of the Twelve Days of Christmas. But I bring it up because this morning my exhortation to you is to celebrate all Twelve Days of Christmas this year. Some of you hear that and perk up, while others of you are tempted right now to check out. Which, I get, because typically I’d be in that latter group. I hear “Twelve Days of Christmas” and “marking them” and think, yeah, that kind of stuff just isn’t for me. But, I’ve experienced how awesome it is to celebrate the Twelve Days of Christmas, and cannot recommend it highly enough to each of you.
First, some Church Calendar 101. Think back to the first few hundred years of the church. Generally, we think about the massive theological questions the early church had to figure out and all the creeds we’ve received as a result. But, creeds aren’t the only gift those first believers left for future generations, like ours. Early Christians also had to figure out how they were going to pattern their lives after encountering the radical gospel of Jesus Christ. This led to the creation of the Church Calendar. The Church Calendar is designed to help Christians orient their lives to the essential moments and rhythms of Jesus’s ministry on earth. Advent is a season of darkness that anticipates God sending a savior. Christmas is a season of celebration and wonder that Jesus was born fully God and fully man. Lent is a season of penitence for our sin and the brokenness of the world that culminates in the death of Jesus. Easter is the bright season of new and eternal life secured by Jesus’s resurrection. And, the more fully we participate in the church calendar, the more our own lives are caught up in the gospel story and the ebbs and flow of death giving way to resurrection.
Our celebration of Christmas doesn’t explicitly come from our Bibles. We inherited it from the early church. But, somewhere along the lines, Christmas ceased to be a 12 day season that followed Advent and began on December 25.
Today, Christmas has crept up so much that it begins somewhere between the middle of October and Black Friday, and ends promptly on December 25. Now, I’m not trying to shame you odd-balls who started setting up Christmas decorations the day after Halloween. And, admittedly, in our house we’ve had some Christmas tunes rocking for a few solid weeks. That’s not the point. The point is, for the majority of the church’s history, Christians have celebrated Christmas differently than we do. And, frankly, I think they did it better and that we’d do well to get back to our roots. So, what did they do? Well, for one, they let Advent be Advent. A four-week season of waiting, anticipation, and longing leading up to Christmas. They prepared their hearts and quieted themselves before God, both reflecting on what it was like before Jesus had entered the world and training themselves to yearn for his second coming. They resisted frenzy, and instead sought after peace. A stark difference from our jam-packed, crazy busy Decembers.
Secondly, they celebrated Christmas for — you guessed it — twelve full days. December 25 through January 5, the early church went big with feasts and celebrations to marvel together at the mystery of God made flesh. Twelve days of uninhibited, unbridled, laugh till your belly hurts, joy. Joy. Which, sadly, is another stark difference from the disappointment that many of us feel acutely around Christmas.
The particular ways they celebrated the twelve days of Christmas are less important. The important part is that Christmas was a season that the whole church participated in and invited others into. Which, is what I’m exhorting us to reclaim today. What would this look like?
Here’s a few ideas:
Instead of one day full of presents, spreading out giving and receiving gifts over the twelve days with aim of cultivating a heart of generosity and gratitude over consumption and greed.
Instead of holding a “Christmas” party before December 25, plan your party for sometime during the twelve days of the 25th through January 5th.
With that, consider having multiple Christmas dinners during the twelve day season of Christmas.
Consider ways to serve your neighbors and spread Christmas cheer throughout the twelve days; shovel their walkways, bake them Christmas cookies, or write them an encouraging Christmas card.
Leave up your Christmas decor, and even add to it throughout the twelve days of Christmas.
These are things that have worked for me and our family, but use your creativity and come up with your own ways that you, your family, housemates, or community group can celebrate the full twelve days of Christmas.
Now, why? Why am I exhorting you, our church, to celebrate Christmas as a full season rather than just one day? I think the most simple answer is, because in a really, really good way, it’s weird. We need the strangeness, the foreignness of the twelve days of Christmas for two reasons. First, we need to be reminded of the wonder of Christmas. We’re so prone to getting caught up in the way that our culture celebrates “the holidays” that, at least for me, so often November and December feel like an exhausting rollercoaster that I cannot wait to get off of on January 1st. But, that’s not how Christmas should be. Twelve days of Christmas gives us the time to unhurriedly marvel, savor, and enjoy the truth that Jesus is God with us.
Secondly, our unbelieving neighbors need to see that our Christmas isn’t the same as their Christmas. Not in an us versus them sort of way, but in a way that we’re able to invite them in to a celebration that is fuller, richer, and deeper than they ever imagined Christmas could be. The strangeness of you inviting them to a Christmas dinner on January 3rd shows that Christmas is something more to you—to us—than it is for those who don’t know Jesus. That it’s not fundamentally about gifts or even time with family, but that it’s about celebrating the birth of Jesus — a birth so profound that the celebration couldn’t possibly end after just one day.
Rather than being conformed to the patterns and practices of our modern culture, we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. The church calendar and the season of Christmas are gifts that our brothers and sisters of old created to help us be renewed and conformed by the gospel story. I exhort us then to take hold of that gift, to celebrate Christmas distinctly as Christians, and in such a way that our strangeness would prove to be the very means by which God would draw those far from him to himself.
