Thanksgiving has passed. Now, it’s Christmas Time! Today through January 6th, Twelfth Night, it’s all Christmas all the Time on the Zeiger homestead.
We really, really enjoy Christmas! It’s our favorite holiday. We regard it as a sacred season, one set aside for total immersion.
Six weeks surely seems excessive to many people. Increasing numbers of people seem to be rejecting the holiday season for various reasons. We embrace it. It’s not just something that’s happening, it is what’s happening.
This attitude serves a couple of purposes. First, it focuses our time and energies on the holiday season. Second, by shutting out as much of the ordinary, the “profane,” if you will, for a full six weeks, we ultimately refresh the everyday. A set period of “otherness” to close one year and begin the next makes the routine of the rest of the year new again. Our ancestors used to call this a “time out of time.” In many ways, we find this to be the perfect description. Soon enough, we’ll drop back into the normality of the rest of the year. By the time we do, it’ll be with a modicum of relief, and a feeling of refreshment. We’ll actually look forward to “getting back to normal.”
Of course, life goes on. This is, after all, a working homestead. No matter what we’re doing, we have to keep moving forward. If you’re not fond of Christmas, don’t leave us—not all our blog posts will be holiday-themed through January 6th. Just most of them!
During Christmas, we celebrate any and all dates within the season, including Advent Sundays, certain Saints Days (even though we’re not Catholic) the Winter Solstice, the Twelve Days of Christmas, and a variety of folk observances along the way. We even observe a holiday unique to the homestead during the season called “First View,” on December 4th.
I’ll write about these at length as the season progresses.
In a calendrical sense, the coming Christmas season is nearly perfect.
The last day of Thanksgiving weekend is the first Sunday of Advent.
St. Nicholas Day and St. Lucia Day fall the day on the second and third Sundays in Advent.
The Winter Solstice falls a day after the Fourth Sunday in Advent.
Even more than last year’s similar alignment, it’s a “perfect storm” holiday, where the different factors coincide to potentially intensify its impact. We hope so!
I used to be shy of such a long holiday celebration. I’ve since figured it out: no matter how long one celebrates Christmas, there’s always someone who started earlier, and will celebrate later!