Post-Christmas

I just finished saying the Office of Readings and Mid-Afternoon Prayer, and as a result, I was reminded forcibly that today is the first day of Ordinary Time in the 2010-11 liturgical year, since I had to dig into the dimly light outskirts of my closet's upper reaches to find Volume III of the Liturgy of the Hours*. Consequently, instead of just banging out yet another barely-focused on and soon forgot recitation of the liturgy in which I barely paid attention to what was being said**, I was forcibly reminded by the physical effort of finding the next volume of the breviary that today marks a major change.

It's interesting, looking back, that this Christmas season was among the best I've ever had in terms of emotional observance. By that I mean that Advent felt like Advent almost right until Vespers I, Christmas Eve, and that Christmas felt majorly festive right through Vespers II of the Epiphany. Part of the credit here goes to the general lack of Christmas music in my life. As entirely too much of a hermit focused on post-class papers, I managed to avoid Christmas carols before leaving Boston. Not that I didn't spend time with my girlfriend... it's just that we don't listen much to music together. What's more, the whole "offend no one's beliefs, have a Happy Holiday" thing is so pervasive now (and maybe especially so in Boston) that even out shopping and such, I don't recall actually hearing any Christmas carols in public--just "Silver Bells," "Jingle Bell Rock" and other secular tunes.

It also helped, once I got back to Canada, that my family was somewhat sick of Christmas music, so it was hardly ever playing. The music returned Christmas Eve or so, just in time to mix with "Midnight" Mass***, and put me in the mood

This holiday mood was then nicely prolonged by coming back to Boston halfway between Christmas and New Years, and getting Christmas all over again (or rather--Christmas Still). Indeed, if it hadn't been for my girlfriend and her family, this might have been the first Christmas since I was 5 that I did not get LEGO, as my own family felt, quite understandably, that a plane ticket home was mostly present enough. Finally, the early date of the Epiphany (Boston, like Edmonton, celebrates the Epiphany on the Sunday after Jan. 1st--whether that's a US-wide rule is something I don't know without looking up). In other words, Epiphany ended the highly festive part of Christmas nice and early, before the glow could wear off.

However, the "spirit of Christmas," to use an over-used but accurate phrase, shouldn't end with the Octave, or even with Epiphany, any more than the spirit of Easter should end with Low Sunday, or even the Ascension. Nor, for that matter, does finishing Vespers II on the Feast of the Baptism mean that Christmas is "over" in the sense of "done, filed away, and left with the ornaments in a dusty recess of our mind's basement until next December."

On the contrary! From a liturgical point of view, forgetting and ignoring Christmas now would be like moving on to Part II of a book, and forgetting everything that happened in Part I. From the start of Advent until the end of Easter, the liturgical calendar tells the story of Christ's earthly life, from the anticipation of His birth to the mission of the Church after His ascension. In this first period of Ordinary Time, separated from the weeks following Pentecost, we can and should, have our minds on the "ordinary" years of Jesus' life between his Incarnation and His death--in particular, perhaps, the "ordinary" years of His ministry, which will crop up in the gospels of the coming weeks.

Historically, there was a period when the Christmas season extended all the way to Candlemas (Feb.2nd, the Feast of the Presentation), and while the Church no long considers the period between the Baptism and the Presentation to be part of the Christmas season, but rather part of Ordinary Time, there are one or two vestiges of the old practice, most notably in the continued recitation of the Alma Redemptoris Mater after Night Prayer--a recitation begun at the start of Advent.

In a way, the fact that Ordinary Time has begun feels appropriate to me, because the ordinary life of the school year resumes in the next week, or has already. Nonetheless, unless one has spectacular amnesia, it is a new ordinary time that is conditioned by what came before, by the break and rejuvenation that happens over the holidays, and to the spiritually minded this surely includes a renewed focus on the Incarnation of Jesus and His many epiphanies--epiphanies that are ever added to in the lives of His followers throughout the world.






*A note to the curious: I was able to avoid having to this for Morning Prayer because I was at my girlfriend's apartment seeing a friend off most of the morning, and I keep my one-volume Christian Prayer there precisely so I don't have to carry the current part of the four-volume set every time I go.

**9/10 of prayer is showing up, I remember Archbishop Collins saying, but it would be nice to get beyond 9/10 a bit more often...

***Which is to say, alas, "10:00 pm Mass."