So Sunday began the season of Advent in the Church. Happy new year!

The Church year is broken up into different seasons. Advent is the first season, leading up to Christmas. Though the radio starts playing Christmas songs somewhere around Halloween, the Christmas season really starts on Christmas day.

For the purposes of this post, I will refer to the Catholic liturgical year based on the Novus Ordo--which is to say that I'm referring to the calendar that most of the modern Church is using. There is another calendar that the Church is concurrently using in parishes that use the Tridentine Latin Mass. In many ways they overlap, in many ways they do not. Save me your debates over which one is superior--I'm over it and don't care to entertain anyone's posturing. Everyone's in Advent right now.

Advent is really a time of preparation for Christmas. In a secular sense, that means that people are doing their shopping and hanging their lights on their house--and you can count me in that number too. But in a spiritual sense, this is when all Christians are called to get themselves ready for the coming of Christ. The Church season has been "Ordinary Time" for several months now--the priests have been wearing green vestments, our churches have been decorated with all kinds of plants and flowers--Ordinary Time is a period of life and vitality. As a kid, I thought "Ordinary Time" sounded a bit... pedestrian. Mundane. Ordinary. As a grown-up, I've come to really appreciate the times that are predictable. Mundane. Ordinary.

But Advent is different. It's time to get out our Advent wreathes and to mark the time until when God becomes Man. The word itself is from the Latin word "Adventus", meaning "coming" or "arrival". Many Protestants (and many confused Catholics) are sticking blue candles in their wreathes these days. The theory is that Royal Blue is a sign of Royalty and that blue is the color of the sky just before the dawn or the waters of a new Creation like in the book of Genesis (cite). Historically though, Catholics have turned to the penitential purple color for most of Advent. Getting ready to accept Christ in our world means that we have to get ourselves ready for Christ. To purify. To rid ourselves of sins.

(At the Walberg Estate, we're making a concession to recession and using some white candles that we had in a cupboard, but in our mind, they're purple. Well, all of them except the third of the four candles. That one is imaginary-rose. Some people may call it a "pink" candle, some people get really up-in-arms (usually priests) that the candle--and their vestments--are not pink. They're rose. It's a big deal. I guess. Who am I to argue?)

The church buildings that have been teeming with signs of life are getting a little bit more plain for a few weeks. The plants and the flowers are gone. The choir, fresh off of their summer hiatus, have only sang "On Eagles' Wings" for a few weeks before they start practicing the somber songs. Truthfully, there's only one Advent song that everyone knows--"O Come, O Come Emmanuel". And all the songs at church have that same weighty tempo and spirit.

It's the time of the year that people begin to set up their Nativity scenes around their house. It's a pretty common custom to get everything ready--except to leave the Baby Jesus out of his feed-stall crib. Again, we're skipping that step at the Walberg estate. I have this strange fear that if I took Baby Jesus and hid him for the next 25 days, I wouldn't be able to find him on Christmas morning, so Christ would never come and the Gates of Heaven would have never opened and we'd all be Jewish (or Muslim) today. That's a lot of pressure on me, so Jesus is away in his manger the whole time. I hope the Advent Police will go easy on me.

There are a number of family customs about what to do during Advent--most of which seem to be well geared to children. Things like an Advent Calendar or a Jesse Tree a great for kindergarteners and young kids, but adults have it a little harder.

In my case, I'm adding a day of fast and abstinence for Wednesdays (like the Orthodox do). I also plan on adding an extra trip to confession on my 8ish-week routine during the Advent season. I'm not as good with going to confession as I should be-- largely because it's harder than heck to find a confession time that isn't on a Saturday afternoon... which is like the hardest day of the week to go to confession. A poor excuse, I know. But I have to think that other people are in the same boat as me-- if confessions were held on a Thursday night from time to time-- yeah! I'd go much more often. I digress.

Advent is a time of stripping down to basics. The days are getting short. The time of Christ is growning near. Get ready to receive Him.