Preparation is crucial to celebrating Christmas well. But so often the kind of preparation most people mean only really adds pressure, and pressure is the last thing any of us needs at this time of year. Part of this is also caused by unreasonable expectations: there’s nothing worse than buying a Christmas cookery book to add a little something to the festive table, only to be told to begin remote preparations somewhere around the Assumption.
But just as preparation is important for this glorious and ongoing feast, so is proper celebration. There is nothing more depressing than walking along the road on New Year’s Day and seeing forlorn fir trees, reduced to denuded twigs because they’ve been next to a radiator since November. Just as preparation is important, so proper celebration is vital too.
About the only benefit of the dreadful lockdown Christmas of 2020 was that many people kept their decorations up until Candlemas – but this is how it should be! It is that alliance of Protestant gloom and capitalist efficiency which robs us of nearly a month of feasting, returning us to humdrum life at one of the greyest, darkest and depressing times of the year. Even the liturgy has capitulated, plunging us back into Ordinary Time, rather than keeping the link with Christmas in the weeks after the Epiphany.
Having come through the pandemic, we are faced with another hard winter. Keeping Christmas going for its proper length of time might be the antidote to our current malaise. Suggesting feasting at a time of economic misery may sound like Marie Antoinette, but feasting does not have to be lavish to be festal.
What counts more than sumptuousness is quantity and the love that goes into preparation. I’ve had finer feasts involving industrial quantities of pasta and a few bottles of red wine than in some excellent restaurants. Opening up our homes and tables to people struggling emotionally or financially is a gift of hospitality and charity. Think of Good King Wenceslas.
Feasting is ultimately about community, and refusing the isolation of the world around us because it opens our homes and our tables to other people. In a time of such difficulty, what could be more welcome than a hearty meal, a listening ear and time shared together? So this year ditch the New Year’s resolutions and the puritanical Dry Januarys – keep those things for Lent. Instead keep feasting and open wide your home, laying a few extra places at the table, if you can.
The other great advantage to keeping Christmas until the Presentation is that you can make the more time-consuming Christmas food which the pre-Christmas social calendar makes difficult. If there’s something you wanted to make for Christmas but didn’t, now’s the time. Our focus on that one blow-out meal on Christmas Day blinds us to the continuing joy of the season, to the meaning of feasting, to taking things more slowly in this festal time, and sometimes even to the reason for having the meal in the first place.
Preparation for Christmas is important, but if your Advent and Christmas were not the time of spiritual joy and preparation you’d hoped for, take this time of Christmastide to rejoice in the feast that we celebrate because God loves us so much that he made his home with us, and asks us in the same way to tabernacle ourselves with others.
When I moved to Edinburgh I became chaplain to the local chapter of the Thomistic Institute, and to celebrate the end of a successful semester we had a small committee supper by way of reward. One of our committee seems to be famed for preparing beef olives, something I had never heard of until news of his fondness for this dish reached me. Happy feasting!
