season

They're putting up Christmas decorations and I am already feeling my annual grumpiness coming on. I hate the cheap sentiment and the contrived experiences connected to snow and family and meals. Not that snow, family and meals are a bad thing.

I tell myself, take a deep breath.

In the church's liturgical calendar, we don't put up our decorations, so to speak, till Christmas week. Advent is a season of anticipation and reflection, more akin in spirit to Lent than to what we see and experience in the secular world during this period called the holiday season.

We await the coming of the King, but the king is not what Central Casting would have ordered up. Nor is he a Coca Cola calendar icon (a marketing ploy that has made their Santa the god of the secular season).