Christmas Only Just Ended

Twelve full days against meaninglessness, lonelinessness, and Coca-Cola

Four years ago, the Covid pandemic put the kibosh on all kinds of social activities. But the roots of Americans loneliness go a lot deeper than a couple years of lockdowns. Robert Putnam warned about the deterioration of civic culture 25 years ago in Bowling Alone. More recently, psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been cataloguing how the smartphone-enabled breakdown of community started ravaging our mental health in the early 2010s. Covid lockdowns just accelerated these trends, but they didn’t start them.

It’s easy to find targets of blame. Millions of Americans live in spread-out suburban neighborhoods where every trip involves a car, so they rarely see neighbors in person. The enervating convenience of on-demand Amazon deliveries means that we rely on each other less, so our relationships wither. First television, then iPhones and the internet, conspired to privatize entertainment, pushing us indoors so that traditional public gathering spots like town squares lost their social power.

As Derek Thompson recently wrote in the Atlantic, all these developments damaged the “middle layer” of people’s social networks — not your close family and friends, not the bigger nation, but the folks you see regularly around town. Without casual conversations between customers and shop clerks or neighbors chatting on stoops, we find ourselves missing the civic belonging that comes from a healthy middle layer.

But there’s another, more fundamental source of our loneliness. In our enthusiasm for authenticity and progress, we’re a culture that fears and avoids boundaries of all kinds. We love wide-open spaces and endless possibilities, self-creation and open floor plans.

But paradoxically, boundaries are what unite people.

I don’t just mean that good emotional boundaries improve relationships (something Thompson also mentions). I’m talking about something more counterintuitive. Without the mutually recognized, cooperatively produced boundaries that mark holidays, important ideas, and sacred things, we lose the ability to share attention, and we drift into isolation.

Let me use a very last-week example show you what I mean and how to fix it.

Christmas Is Twelve Days

Now that we’re approaching mid-January, Christmas is finally over.

Wait, you might be saying. What? December 25th was more than two weeks ago. For a lot of Americans, it was a single, explosive, wrapping paper–and-pie–filled 24-hour window at the end of a long chaotic season of shopping and holiday jingles. It was long gone by New Year’s, much less halfway through January.

But the 25th wasn’t the end of the Christmas season. It was the beginning.

The idea of there being twelve days to Christmas survives today mostly in the lyrics of the popular carol, but in sacramental Christianity, the twelve days — Christmastide — are very much a thing. Christmastide starts on Christmas Day and wraps up at midnight before Epiphany, January 6th. There’s a discrete boundary around the Christmas season, one that ensures that the season lasts long enough to sink your teeth into.

If you want to be truly countercultural as a Christian and help re-enchant the world, celebrating the full twelve days should be near the top of your to-do list. There’s something magical about an extended season of lights, carols, and feasting at the dark end of the year. It evokes the older Christian cycle of fasting and feasting and gives the celebration enough time to permeate your imagination.

But it’s tough to make a twelve-day celebration happen on your own. Impossible, really. Outside human culture, the waning weeks of December are just a brute progression of short days and long nights. The weather is chilly because the northern hemisphere (sorry, Southern Hemisphere readers!) is tilted away from the sun. These are the objective, physical facts. But these facts don’t provide a focus for shared attention. The cold air and late sunrises will be there even if you’re alone, or dead.

Christmas, though, isn’t waiting out there to be discovered. You have to help create it. No social or religious boundaries exist out there in nature, the way gravity or iron do. The work of calling them into existence brings people together.

This is why boundaries make for community.

Celebrating the twelve days with friends and family until Epiphany means that you’re sharing attention, partaking in a joint enterprise. The clear boundary around the season — celebrations kick off on Christmas Eve and wind down on the 5th — makes the contrast with the surrounding weeks and days crisp, salient, noticeable. But if you and your friends disagree about when Christmas ends — December 25h? Epiphany? — you lose that crispness. You have a coordination problem. Boundaries forge unity, but they also need unity.

Contrasts Make Culture

America has always divided its collective attention between two irreconcilable stories: the American Dream — success through hard work, shared prosperity, and material progress — and the older, Christian story that undergirded the European culture we descended from. It’s unsurprising, then, that American culture has often seemed a bit unfocused, a kind of restless searching rather than a real garden for roots to grow in. We’re not quite sure what story we’re in.

Until recently, Christmas sort of spoke to both of these stories. The shopping, consumerism, and marketing of the Christmas season expressed the American Dream in a kind of doofy, unselfconscious way. It was kitschy, but fun. The creches and Jesus-filled music on the radio reminded us annually of the underlying Christian story. You could decide how seriously you wanted to take that part of it. The Christmas season provided a unifying focal point, bridging otherwise incompatible ideas of America.

But the American Christmas, like American Christianity, was shallow. And like American culture itself, it began to lose the boundaries that originally made it cohere, that imparted meaning to the season. In the first half of the 20th century, popular magazines like Time or the Saturday Evening Post would often play up the images of the Virgin and the Christ child. They’d even quote scripture on their covers. That’s pretty much gone. The consumerist version of Christmas has decisively triumphed over the religious one.¹

I bring this up because the ascendancy of the Santa Claus-and-Coke December marketing season eroded one of the most important boundaries for Christmas: Advent, the four-week period of somber waiting that’s supposed to lead up to the Nativity.

Unlike Christmastide, Advent is a season of sobriety, even a penitential season. The liturgical color for vestments and altar coverings is purple, the same as for Lent — not exactly a time for partying. This period of sobriety and reflection is supposed to come to a dazzling close with Christmas Eve. For Catholic midnight Mass, the liturgical color is suddenly white, the hue of high feasts and celebrations.

Without Advent, you don’t anticipate Christmas with quite the same bittersweet ache. Advent accentuates the darkness of the December nights and foregrounds the promise of light. It’s supposed to set off Christmas like shadows against the light in a Caravaggio.

This strategy works because the brain is built to pay attention to changes and contrasts. In our visual field, the edges between two fields of color indicate where a house roofline stops and the sky begins. In the flow of time, our brain’s default prediction is that whatever just happened will continue happening. Unanticipated sights and sounds draw our attention.

Caravaggio understood your brain

So if you hold off on celebrations and decorations during Advent, it feels like something has actually happened when Christmas finally comes. My wife and I wait to play the really fun Christmas music, including the cheesy pop crooner classics, until Christmas Eve. We put up our unapologetically tacky baubles on the tree that has been bare except a string of lights since early December. It’s a relief. Advent has paid off, making us hungry for Christmas, rather than sick of it already.

Twelve Days: The Other Boundary

But if you’ve endured a weeks-long time of fasting and repentance, a single day of celebration doesn’t really cut it. Too much buildup for too little reward. So the natural counterpart of observing Advent is to extend Christmas into twelve days. Now Christmas spans New Year’s Day, extending the time of celebration across two calendar years. Christ’s time comes first. Secular time is secondary.

Once again, the consumerist distaste for boundaries makes this difficult. The twelve days are meant to be a kind of extended sabbath, a time for taking a break from work and life, for feasting and time with friends and family. It’s really a deep pause in the year.

Sabbaths and pauses, though, make both marketers and Americans nervous. Our national Puritanism retains the old work ethic but has lost the sabbatarian discipline. If you’re quiet and recreating for too many days, you might encounter things in your psyche you’d rather not. If everyone take twelve days off from serious work, the economy crumbles.

So the Santa-and-Coke version of American Christmas mostly prefers to contain the actual celebration to a single day. Maybe you can extend it a bit, visit different relatives on the 26th and 27th. But nearly two weeks? Come on.

Caroling as Counterculture

Against this backdrop, celebrating Christmastide is countercultural. It takes work and collaboration. That’s why I first started inviting people to come sing carols late in Christmastide a few years ago.

Our first late-Christmas caroling party took place on our back deck after New Year’s during the miserable depths of the first Covid winter. It was frigid cold in Massachusetts and most people were masked. We ladled out hot apple cider and hot cocoa from cauldrons, which quickly froze in people’s mugs. It was not comfortable. But it was fun.

We’ve kept up the tradition. This year in early January, around 40 of our closest friends packed into our smallish apartment, mostly Catholics and Anglicans, but also nonreligious folks and members of other Protestant traditions. On offer were soups, cheese, crackers, mulled wine, hot apple cider, and more desserts than we could cram onto the rickety serving table. Guests brought even more desserts and — thankfully — salad and vegetables, as well as more wine, baked goods, and other celebratory delectables. Eventually we gathered in the living room to sing carols, and I mean real carols: folk melodies like “I Wonder as I Wander,” medieval treats like “Patapan” and “Noël Nouvelet,” and rousing feast songs like “Masters in This Hall.”

Music is the ultimate social glue. So singing together with friends, making the shortest and darkest days of the year burst with song, hot drinks, and glimmering lights, was really a kind of enjoyable insurrection against the antisocial and boundaryless gods of our age.

It’s On You. And God

At its best, a real Christian culture offers many focal points like this, meaningful contrasts between, say, fast and feast. The sharp boundaries between a long season of contemplative preparation and an extended Christmastide capture attention, set off the Christian faithful from the ho-hum external world, and give us something fun to do together.

But our host culture mistrusts such contrasts and boundaries, so you’re not going to have these things just by going along with daily life. Institutional leaders in the church probably won’t forge the way, either. They’re busy.

So if you want your family, your church, your group of friends to celebrate Christmastide next year, you’ll need to be ready to do it yourself. Host caroling parties later in the Christmastide season. Gather to feast for Twelfth Night. Keep the light alive during the dark of the turning year.

Draw people together to carve out clear boundaries in the undifferentiated pulp of the year, and you forge a community. Inscribe periods of fasting and feasting in the monotony of time, and watch the world grow richer with meaning. Meaning is always social for human beings. To solve the loneliness crisis is to solve the meaning crisis.

We draw this power from profound wells indeed. The meaningful boundaries that we co-create, that turn a collection of individuals into an “us,” partake in the aboriginal creative power of God. In Christian understanding, God is a Trinity of persons, relational to the core. When he spoke creation into being, he did so out of love — to have Something — Someone — to relate to.

In doing so, he gave us the template for all of human life. “Let there be light,” he said. The world appeared. And the day separated from the night, the darkness from the light.

1. To be fair, the Santa Claus–and-Coke version of Christmas was already well advanced by the 1920s, as attested by magazine covers from the New Yorker.