The more time goes on, the less and less interested I become in celebrating the secular versions of holidays, and the more interested I become in returning our holidays to their past religious glory.
I started making the “big” holidays our own a year or two ago, with Easter and Holy Week, after the spirit prompted me, and shortly after our Church Leaders called on us to make this time a bigger, more special, more religious and less secular time for our families. It has been a huge success and my kids now look forward to our Easter Sunday “Sunrise Picnic” WAY more than they ever cared about the Easter Bunny filling their Easter Baskets.
So now I am on a journey to do the same thing with the Christmas season. I’ve been reading about how Christmas (especially the 12 days of Christmas) used to be celebrated and the religious significance of it all. I’ve never understood The 12 Days of Christmas thing or where it came from. Suddenly it now all makes sense why people used to not put their Christmas trees up until Christmas Eve. I have always wondered “why would people only want their tree up for one day before Christmas?!” but that’s because modern, secular Christmas (and the Christmas marketing season) starts earlier and earlier and basically ends on the 26th of December and then moves on to secular New Years activities like partying and getting drunk. While traditionally and religiously, the Christmas season used to (and in a lot of devout Christian religions still does) not really even start UNTIL Christmas Eve and then the festivities continued all the way through “Epiphany” aka January 6th. Also, oftentimes “Twelfth Night” (The night of January 5th) was actually a bigger day for feasting and presents than December 25th. Our secular world has made The 12 Days of Christmas into a time when you give one gift a day leading up to December 25th but in reality The 12 Days of Christmas refers to the 12 days following (or beginning with) December 25th.
Moving forward, I plan to start our “holiday festivities” with Advent (beginning either the Sunday nearest November 30th or on December 1st, depending on your specific religious tradition), and with St. Nicholas Day on December 6th, where we will learn about the legend of St. Nicholas (or in other words, the REAL origin of Santa Claus), thus getting the “secular” (but not actually secular because St. Nicholas wasn’t secular) side of Christmas out of the way at the beginning of December, but on a much smaller scale than traditional Santa. Thus launching the season of giving and moving into “Lighting the World” and celebrating our Savior.
I’m still working out the details of how I want to arrange all of this and present it to my children. Or in other words, I’m still in the process of working out what I want my own family’s traditions to look like for this holiday season moving forward, but I am excited for the journey we are now embarking on and hopefully I will have it more or less figured out for the holiday season of 2025 moving into 2026.
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