“Holiday Season” and Christmas Season

[Denise]

John M. Grondelski

Monday, January 6, 2025

In America, the secular “holiday season” ended sometime around 4 am on January 1, as the last New Year’s revelers made their way home for a long winter’s nap. Most likely before the 12 days of Christmas are out, most Christmas trees will be gone as well. January 6 will, this year for several reasons, be less often remembered as “Epiphany” than as “Insurrection Day.”

Instead, something of a quadrennial secular “holiday season” will now set in. The new Senate and House assembled on January 3. Congress will gather today, January 6, to count Electoral College ballots and confirm the election of the new president and vice president. Finally, on January 20, the (somewhat) new president will be inaugurated.

This year’s festive political holiday will be interrupted by one – potentially two – somber events. Wedged into the week of January 6 will be the state funeral of Jimmy Carter, including Washington services on January 9. And Donald Trump’s inauguration coincides with Martin Luther King Day, which is likely to spur controversy over how the new president does (or doesn’t) embody King’s commitments to racial equality.

In any event, the “holiday season” in the religious sense is, for all intents and purposes, over for most Americans. They’ll have to wait until next September before they can begin to see Christmas ornaments again.

The Church, of course, insists that the holiday season has only just begun. Christmas Time lasts officially until January 11. Unofficially, it can extend through March 4, Mardi Gras, which is to say “Carnival.”

This bifurcation of the “holiday season” from the fullness of Christmas is not, as with the Orthodox, a case of different calendars. It’s a question of different perspectives about the “holiday.”

The Church spent most of December in Advent, the Christmas preparatory season. America’s “holiday season” has no Advent: December is not so much “preparation” (for what would we prepare save the grand finale?) as it is “anticipation,” incrementally celebrating the big day through holiday parties, caroling, and attending “The Nutcracker” or “A Christmas Carol.” The “preparation” we get is the consumer countdown of buying days until December 25.

For Christians, what started on December 25 continues to have defining value in human life. In its secular shadow, however, the “holiday” is a date, sanctioned by culture and tradition. But nothing more. To attribute to it an abiding significance would, many might argue, breach the “separation of church and state” and unfairly smuggle sectarianism into the public square. Or something like that.


The Magi by J.C. Leyendecker, 1900 [This was the cover of the “Christmas Number” of Success magazine]
Consider that for Catholics, while January 1 has an intrinsic connection to Christmas (the octave day whose Gospel also includes references to the shepherds’ coming), for “holiday” keepers it need not. Christmas trees might offer a pretty ambience, but the focus is on hopes for a better future, without the conviction that what happened eight days prior is what makes that better future possible.

Catholics should not just throw up their hands and acquiesce to this regrettable descent into the status quo. While our larger culture may sharply divide the sacred and the civil, we need not go along. At the very least, we should try to save the spirit of the traditional Christmas season through January 6.

Epiphany, which means the manifestation of the Savior to the “gentiles” (i.e., to the world), was at one time a more important feast than December 25. Also, given that our Orthodox brethren mark Christmas on January 7-8, common ecumenical witness might latch on to the extended celebration to keep Christmas alive.

There are, of course, factors militating against Catholics – even in the Church. The U.S. bishops’ transfer of Epiphany to a Sunday has truncated “Christmas Time” and left a vacuum for the identification of January 6 to be filled by a partisan reading. (“Twelfth Night” hardly makes sense to modern Christians when Epiphany can be – according to transfer by episcopal fiat – anywhere from Ninth to Fourteenth Night. This results in yet another element of our Christian past rendered incoherent thanks to “pastoral” tinkerers.

That doesn’t mean that we – lay and religious faithful – shouldn’t try to resist both the secular and liturgical reduction of Christmas. Catholics should work to reattach the fullness of Christmas to the Christmas “holiday.”

One of the best ways is to refuse the tendency to hustle off Christmas proper as soon after December 25 as we can. Because, in the process of cutting off “Christmas” on December 25 (and thus, practically amputating it even from New Year’s Day) we abet the secularization that denies Christianity had any formative, defining role in our culture.

The first place to begin is at home. Do the Christmas tree, Christmas decorations, and Nativity scene need to go away on the truncated “American” timetable? Once upon a time, some Catholic cultures kept them up at least through February 2, the Presentation of the Lord.

We can also start in our schools. Why do “Christmas plays” have to be scheduled only before Christmas? Would it be a “bad thing” to put on performances of the arrival of the magi, the epiphany, the presentation in the Temple, the circumcision, and other landmarks in Our Lord’s early life in January, too?

Either we will define the “holiday season” as Christmas or others will define Christmas for us as “the holiday season.” It’s not about saying “Merry Christmas!” versus “Happy Holidays!” (though what we say is telling). It’s bigger than that. It’s about Ebenezer Scrooge’s pledge to “honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year!”

Or at least through Twelfth Night.

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/