Reflections for Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas, and New Year's

The final weeks of the year are filled with multiple celebrations: Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas, New Year’s. Everyone in the United States is impacted by the festivities of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, even people who try to ignore the celebrations. Businesses close, public events are numerous, and most families have some kind of activity commemorating these days.

Advent is another story. Many Americans don’t even know what it is. While the Big Three celebrations all have varying degrees of religious significance, Advent is plainly and simply an effort to instill or reclaim the Christian dimension of Christmas. 

Beginning Saturday, November 24, daily religious reflections will appear on this website in keeping with each of these seasons.

These reflections are from my book, Reflections for the Festive Seasons, © 2002.  All rights reserved.

The Advent season begins four Sundays before Christmas Day. Advent starts the Liturgical Year, which many denominations follow, focusing on events in the life of Jesus and the life of the church. Advent means coming, and the Advent season is a time of spiritual preparation for Christmas, which celebrates the coming of Jesus as the promised Messiah.

Advent varies in length. If Christmas is on Sunday, four Sundays before Christmas give Advent 28 days. When Christmas is on other days, Advent is shorter because there are fewer total days from the first Sunday of Advent till Christmas  Day. This series follows the pattern of many Advent books with 24 readings in the  Advent section.

With the inclusion of readings for Thanksgiving and New Year’s and with only seven of the liturgical twelve days of Christmas, this series does not adhere precisely to the Liturgical Year. 

Thanksgiving and New Year’s are not religious days as such, though each holds great potential for reflecting on spiritual dimensions of life. 

Thanksgiving, logically, involves giving thanks to God, although that emphasis easily gets lost in the swirl of football, turkey, parades, and the launch of holiday shopping on the eve of Black Friday. 

New Year’s can be a serious---even holy---time if we use it to look back on our lives in the past year and seek God’s help to make changes and improvements in the  year that is dawning. This may take effort, amid boisterous, drunken parties on New Year’s Eve and ball games, parades, and hangovers occupying many on New Year’s Day.

This series includes seven readings for Thanksgiving, beginning November 24; Advent with 24 readings, beginning December 1; Christmas with seven, beginning December 25; and a final reading for New Year’s Day. 

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, Copyright 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America.  Used by permission.  All rights reserved.

Most of the daily readings focus on a person who was born or a person who died on that day. These people, whose lives have made a difference in the larger society, include an ever-present wartime legend, industrialists, cartoonists, authors and publishers, musicians, a civil rights activist, religious leaders, television personalities, explorers, martyrs, a politician, an archaeologist, a Bible translator, a saloon wrecker, and the Son of God. 

Other readings are based on events that occurred on given dates, events which had an impact on the world’s life: an invention, awarding of peace prizes, ratification of the Bill of Rights, the openings of a cathedral, the first YMCA in the United States, and Ellis Island as an immigration center.

Each day’s reading is offered with the prayerful hope that it will enrich your understanding of the potential for good in the world’s daily life and that it will encourage you, day by day, with God’s help, to add to the good in your own relationships.

Lawrence Webb