Bracketing Christmas

otzberg photo courtesy Flickr

The traditional yearly calendar of the Roman Catholic church is a helpful guide to pacing the household over Christmas, aka carnival or Saturnalia.

The church year begins with Advent, a short version of Lent that starts on December 1. It’s a time for ordinary food and no great indulgence. Sunday is the time for treats and to observe the passing of the month by lighting one more candle of the four displayed on the horizontal Advent wreath. Advent is a good time to make paper chains, string popcorn and cranberries, and generally occupy hyperactive, housebound children who are wired on toy commercials.

Traditionally, the tree was put up on Christmas Eve. This is not a bad way to keep the kids out of your hair when they’re going ballistic. Christmas Eve is opening day, so to speak. It’s a meatless feast, which simplifies preparation for the first of three back-to-back major meals, the hostess’ version of the Long March.

When my son was small, as a security measure and to keep things down to a dull roar, I kept gifts out of sight until Christmas Eve. The Santa theory of gift arrival, that I might have observed more closely, is a better way to protect children from being overstimulated by flashy wrapping paper. We respond to high-tech holiday visuals like a starving salmon catching a glimpse of a brass spoon.

The Christmas season lasts until Twelfth Night. Focussing on that date as the end of the celebration makes it feel less grinch-ey to calm Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Here’s the good part. A few years ago, I learned from a friend who had lived in New Orleans for twelve years that Christmas may end on Twelfth Night, but the carnival season begins the next day and continues until the party shuts down on Ash Wednesday, “the number one hangover show”, to borrow from a KEXP disc jockey.

On carnival Fridays, it is traditional to bring a king cake to one’s work group. The confection is a rich vanilla sheet cake decorated as gaudily as one can imagine with purple, gold, and green colored sugars and edible ornaments. A bean or ceramic figure of the Christ child is baked into the cake, and, assuming they’re not at the dentist, the person who is served that slice makes the cake the next week. If theology is a concern, I see no reason not to honor another role model in the cake.

This weekly tune-up for Mardi Gras is a fine way to spend the dark and soggy months of a Northwest winter. I like to think that the post-Katrina diaspora will enrich all our cities with New Orleans’ love of good living.

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