The wisdom of the seasons is undeniable if we but take a moment to consider it. Such wisdom may be forgotten in this age, when we can drive to our supermarket and pick out any type of fruit we want because it is globally procured. It is trampled, too, by the landslide of commercialism that rushes ahead to money-making holidays at a faster and faster pace. Some stores were displaying Christmas decorations by mid-September. It would be almost unthinkable, except that it’s happened.
And, yet, the seasons still prove an immovable force. September and October will always be the bulk of the harvest in most of the northern hemisphere and Western culture. The push to start wearing sweaters and drinking pumpkin spice lattes in late August, when everyone is tired of sweating, is not going to make cooler days come any faster. People will simply be perspiring more in their heavy, mostly-polyester sweaters until the rotational tilt of the earth shifts. The date of Christmas and the Winter Solstice will not occur any sooner if we drop November’s Martinmas harvest and American Thanksgiving in the mud and opt for full blown “Happy Holiday” (a.k.a. Christmas) decorations by November 1st. Spring is a little harder to ruin because—no matter how we try—we can’t force the snow to melt or plant our seedlings any earlier, even if the secular culture brings out eggs and bunnies before Lent is properly on its way.
Of course we can ask why certain holidays like Thanksgiving have all but disappeared under mass consumerism, while we still see evidence of Halloween and Christmas. The sidelining of all harvest festivals in favor of a generic ‘fall’ is its own side discussion, but a simple point of reflection is that harvest festivals and their corresponding Catholic feasts have disappeared because the harvest is a non-existent experience when modern man’s experience of food is tied to the supermarket rather than agriculture. We cannot reconstruct the seasons even by rushing each season’s superficial associations
Instead, we can observe three results. First, the dizzying speed at which we push forward to each new holiday—only to immediately forget it on the day it ends, so that we may rush on to the next with no time or anticipation in between—leads to a complete exhaustion of the soul. The body, too, ends up gasping for relief because the entire purpose of a holiday—in opposition to the consumerist approach—is a day set apart for festival time, worship, and leisure. The word ‘holiday’ itself comes from ‘holy day.’ The sad outcome is that ever more people each year are abandoning holiday festivities and traditions simply because the joy and energy has disappeared due to the secular rush. “Recuperative rest and cheerful play seem to be necessary for life,” declares Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. It is no wonder that festivity diminishes when our holidays lack meaningful culture and offer no pause from modern marketing and the workaday grind. As Josef Pieper so astutely states in his Leisure the Basis of Culture:
The meaning of celebration, we have said, is man’s affirmation of the universe and his experiencing the world in an aspect other than its everyday one … nothing illustrates so clearly that festivity is only possible where divine worship is still a vital act—and nothing shows this so clearly as a comparison between a living and deeply traditional feast day, with its roots in divine worship, and one of those rootless celebrations, carefully and unspontaneously prepared beforehand, and as artificial as a maypole.
Where Pieper has referenced “Brutus Days” and Labor Day, we might add the secular takeover of Halloween or St. Valentine’s Day.
Second, the constant rush to each new event destroys the body’s biological rhythm. Women’s bodies are a good example of this. They go through an entire four seasons of rhythm every month in their cycle. Rushing one, or missing another, is one of the causes leading to fertility issues, of which we are seeing an enormous rise today. It’s the same with the rhythm of the year. We have seasons for a reason. The body needs time every year to rest, regenerate, grow, and let go just as creation does in order to bear fruit again each year. Even the spaces between the human holidays that traditionally align with many of nature’s seasonal events have mini-cycles of seasons within them. Think of the lull, anticipation, full celebration, and slow putting away that a traditional calendar sees between the culminating even of each month (or liturgical season).
Third, the consistent rush completely ruins the wonder of each new season. Instead of having time to become bored, as it were, with resting and naturally begetting excitement for an upcoming event, we instead have no time amid the general rush to keep up with commercial demands. We find ourselves constantly too busy—not only for meaningful connection with other humans, but for celebrating holidays, living seasonally, and connecting with our own bodies. All around us and within us we can see the mess that this creates.
This wisdom of the seasons is a wisdom that the Church follows, too. There’s a reason that November is the month of All Saints, All Souls, and Christ the King, as the final harvests die off. It’s both a time of abundance in the barns and cellars, and a time of death—with gloomy, wild nights that the Church mirrors both in her celebration of the triumphant souls in Heaven and in the prayers for the deceased in the vale of tears. Even the harvest feasts of olden days falling on liturgical feasts like Michaelmas and Martinmas (and mirrored somewhat in the idea of the American holiday of Thanksgiving) are meant to evoke this plenty as the days draw shorter. Following St. Andrew’s Day (and only then) the Church traditionally starts the season of Advent and wholeheartedly gives herself over to Advent wreaths, Rorate Masses, candlelit processions to Bethlehem, and Jesse Trees. The gift of the Redeemer is hinted at in the arrival of St. Nicholas and St. Lucy in various countries early in December, and the longing for the Messiah reaches fever pitch with the O Antiphons, before culminating in the hushed, candlelit procession to the Nativity, after which Midnight Mass is triumphantly rung in. Then begins a season of festivities and joy that traditionally extended beyond New Years, through Epiphany, and, in olden Europe, all the way until the processions of Candlemas, where we move to the adult life of Christ before Lent.
Seasonally, this makes absolute sense, at least in the Northern Hemisphere (because the Church calendar was developed around that region quite a while before most missionaries advanced to the tropics and Australia). Since seasonal reversal is a topic too wide to be compassed in this short article, Pope Benedict XVI, in Spirit of the Liturgy, has a beautiful reflection for residents in those regions:
Now in the Southern Hemisphere everything is reversed. The Christian Easter falls, not in the spring, but in the autumn. Christmas coincides, not with the winter solstice, but with high summer. This raises the questions of ‘inculturation’ with great urgency. If the cosmic symbolism is so important, ought we not to adjust the liturgical calendar for the Southern Hemisphere? G. Voss has rightly responded by point out that, if we did this, we would reduce the mystery of Christ to the level of a merely cosmic religion; we would be subordinating history to the cosmos. But the historical does not serve the cosmic; no, the cosmic serves the historical. … Voss has very beautifully pointed to the ‘autumnal’ aspects of the Easter mystery, which deepen and broaden our understanding of the feast and give it a special profile appropriate to the Southern Hemisphere. … The autumn of declining time becomes a new beginning, while the spring, as the time of the Lord’s death, now point to the end of time, to the autumn of the world, in which, according to the Fathers, Christ came among us.
According to the Northern Hemisphere, the Church follows along with natural harvest, uses the gloom of November to turn us to eternity, builds up longing in December, and continues with a multitude of reasons to feast through January which otherwise would be the longest, gloomiest, and hardest season in which to keep warm without extra food. Lent comes not only as a time of fasting for the liturgical season but also coincides with the lengthening of days, the fact that—outside of modern convenience—cellars and barns are beginning to empty of food, and that it is time for those who feasted over winter to regain composure for the rigorous work ahead of planting and cultivating the land.
This is crucially different than autumn in August, Christmas immediately following Halloween, a near obliteration of Thanksgiving, and the stark end to Christmas at midnight on December 25, all of which we see rampant everywhere. And this is not to fault anyone who really needs extra cheer this year, or who decides to set up Christmas decorations a little earlier because of travel or the birth of a new family member. It is, however, a nudge to one and all to let November be November and December be December, to the best of their planning and ability.
Celebrating the Saints, praying for the Holy Souls, processing the harvest, and ending the month with a feast of gratitude surrounded by family and friends can easily fill the November days. Harvest decor, pumpkins and squashes, hot cider, logging, and cozy fires fit this time naturally. Even buying ahead for Christmas gifts can be aligned with the idea of storing the harvest for the season ahead.
When they finally come, Jesse Trees, Advent Wreaths, gift making, garland weaving, baking indoors on bad weather days, and the trek to find a Christmas tree are all perfectly suited to December, along with the influx of concerts, Christmas Markets, and candlelight. The Christmas season itself can then bear the fullness of a completely decorated tree, the cookie eating, the actual gift giving, and the Christ Child now in the manger, all without seeming to go overboard when it stretches through January. “Christmas in December? What a novel idea,” the modern mind might say. It is a small shift, but a mighty one.
