It's Advent - now! It's Advent - now!
Seasonal thoughts from Peter Jordan,
minister in the Sunderland & Boldon Partnership
After some weeks of wading through an aisle full of Hallowe’en consumables at the local supermarket - Hallowe’en having, like so many festivals, leapt from comparative obscurity into the market place of Big Business – I went along to B&Q to buy some bulbs to plant in pots for Spring flowering – and again had to wade through aisles of ‘seasonal’ goods.
Actually, there weren’t many bulbs left – the space had been given over to artificial Christmas trees, together with every illuminating decoration one could imagine, for internal and external use.
There are times when I'm sure I've missed something important. There are more times when I have an uneasy feeling that I may have missed something important, but can't quite put my finger on it.
I first wrote about this on November 17th 2005, when Sunderland, amongst other towns and cities, was switching on the illuminations. Earlier in the week the local news coverage had included a man who claimed to have the largest domestic outdoor light display in Europe, based on the fact that his house needed two industrial consumer units to deal with the electricity supply.
The news team also mentioned other enthusiasts, who spend fortunes on outdoor lighting at this time of the year – a growing trend - and observed that we seem to have absorbed yet another American craze, that of 'competitive decoration'.
Apparently things had become so 'competitive' in one village in the North East that some residents offered to pay another to take down their ostentatious spectacle. We were not informed why, but my hope was that at least someone had objected to the prodigal waste of electricity, causing further carbon dioxide emissions and adding to the problem of global warming. Or perhaps light pollution was an issue – such that with all the brilliance of outdoor illumination we can no longer enjoy the stars – let alone spot any angels appearing over hillsides.
Which brought me to the point of asking ‘ Who brought Advent forward?’ We are used to British Summer Time and the switch to Greenwich Mean Time in the Autumn, but doesn't Advent begin on the fourth Sunday before Christmas rather than the middle of November?
Once again we appear to have lost the plot. For instead of entering into the great themes of waiting, preparation, looking for the Light of the World and the wonder of God's appearance in the humble and ordinary, now we are subject to 'competitive decoration'.
On the BBC Breakfast programme recently, one of the presenters mentioned the word ‘shopping’, as opposed to ‘retail’, which the business presenter was about to report on. It signified for me the way our society has moved – from the ‘simple’ to the ‘sophisticated’, losing something along the way.
What we are also witnessing is, perhaps, the disappearing of the last vestiges of Christendom. We know that Christmas was a takeover of an existing religious festival. Now we are seeing it transforming into a secular festival of Retail – the heart of our modern economy.
Am I the only one who feels uneasy?
The Peace of the Light of the World be with you.