Cooks and Christmas

I was listening to one of the innumerable cooking shows the other day, The Chew, in which these culinary giants started talking about, in response to a letter, about the proper time to put up and take down the Christmas tree; perhaps just the latter. They all concluded that the proper time to take down the Christmas tree was on January 1^st. Fools!

These folk may know a lot about cooking but they don’t know squat about the liturgical church seasons. I believe I had an argument with the cats about this the other day.

Once, more, this is the season of Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas and the Christmas season. It is a time of preparation and reflection upon God coming into the world as God incarnate as a child in Bethlehem. Christmas lasts from Christmas day (you can toss in Christmas even if you’d like) and lasts until Epiphany or 12 days later. Remember the songs The Twelve Days of Christmas? So, if we follow our sacred traditions you put up the Christmas tree on Christmas even of Christmas day and you leave it up until Epiphany and then take it down.

I wonder how many people in this country do that? I suspect very few as we are truly a secular country which uses Christmas as the time to hawk gifts so stores can have their best bottom line of the year.

I say this with all hypocrisy as we put our tree up a couple of days ago and I will likely have to fight to keep it up until Epiphany or if laziness prevails, later yet.

So, why on earth do folk write to cooks about the proper time to put up and take down Christmas trees? Ask them about figgy pudding or something they know about, but not about Christmas. And given the weight, with some exceptions to these TV cooks, I’m not sure we should even ask them about food. If we eat all  the calories laden fat imbued stuff we will all be obese; oh, we are most obese as a country.

It doesn’t have to be that way. I read a nice piece in a recent Christian Century issue about a agnostic mother who always did an advent calendar with her kids and read the Christmas story from the gospels each Christmas. They got the meaning of Christmas. The article didn’t say whether the mother was a believing or disbelieving agnostic.

Bah hum bug. Not to the religious celebration of Jesus’ birth, but to the secular crap that celebrates and material greed.

Oh well, sit back, crack open a beer and pig out on Christmas day and what what we worship regularly - football.