Waiting for christmas

By Kevin Eckstrom
copyright Religion News Service and Fort Worth Star-Telegram December 10, 2005

The Christmas tree is up and lighted at Christ Lutheran Church in Marietta, Ga., and the Rev. Rusty Edwards just can't wait to sing a few lines of O Little Town of Bethlehem, his favorite Christmas song.

"'The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight,'" Edwards said, recalling the 1867 lyrics by Phillips Brooks. "It's the greatest line of any hymn ever written."

But the liturgical calendar, which lays out the songs and Scriptures for each Sunday of the church year, doesn't include those beloved Christmas carols and hymns until Dec. 25. That's because, despite what Macy's and Wal-Mart might say, Christmas doesn't start until Dec. 25, and, in many churches, it runs past New Year's Day.

So, during the four Sundays of Advent, Edwards' church will sing Advent hymns, not Christmas carols. It's an area of church music that many musicians say is overlooked and underdeveloped, although a new burst of Advent-hymn writing is helping to fill the gap.

For Edwards, the anticipation of those favorite carols is making him feel like a 5-year-old waiting for a visit from Santa on Christmas Eve. Desperate for some Christmas music, the congregation held a carols service on a recent Saturday night. Sunday morning caroling would have to wait a few more weeks.

"Singing Christmas songs after Christmas reminds me of people who send belated birthday cards," Edwards said. "Nice try, but a little late."

In Catholic and many mainline Protestant congregations, the church year is partitioned into different seasons. Unlike a secular calendar, the liturgical church year starts on the first Sunday of Advent, which is four weeks before Christmas. This year, Advent started on Nov. 27.

The "season" of Christmas doesn't actually start until Dec. 25 and usually lasts for 12 days -- with those eight maids a-milking and seven swans a-swimming -- until the Feast of the Epiphany, on Jan. 6.

That gives churches two Sundays, Dec. 25 and Jan. 1, to sing Christmas carols and songs this year.

Advent's true believers say the ancient tradition is a season of preparation and anticipation, a sort of kinder and gentler version of Lent, the 40 days of prayer and penance leading up to Easter.

Advent has its own songs and traditions -- including lighting the four candles of the Advent wreath -- and musicians say it would be premature to sing Christmas songs about the birth of Christ before he's actually born.

"It would be a little bit like opening your Christmas presents before Christmas morning, like sneaking into the closet and ruining the surprise," said Kathleen Pluth, a Catholic hymn writer in Washington, D.C. "It's a bit of a letdown."

Added Michael McCarthy, the music director at Washington National Cathedral, "Would you sing Happy Birthday before someone's birthday? That's basically it."

So what's wrong with a little Advent music? To start, there's not much of it -- at least much that is as familiar as Christmas carols. The perennial favorite is O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, based on a 12th-century chant. Others include Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus and Comfort, Comfort Now My People.

Pluth, who has written hymns for Advent, admits that O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, yes, is overdone." Edwards, too, has written new Advent hymns, including one, To a Maid Engaged to Joseph, that can be found in Methodist and Presbyterian hymnals. Pluth is especially proud of her Advent hymn On Walls Around Jerusalem.

Mary Louise VanDyke, the director of the Dictionary of American Hymnology at Oberlin College in Ohio, said hymn writers are slowly rediscovering Advent, which she said has been overshadowed by all the "bright tinsely stuff" of Christmas.

"People are just so anxious to sing Christmas carols that they're smothering the Advent hymns," VanDyke said.

Pluth and others say Advent hymns are easier to write than Christmas songs, in part because the sweet sentiment of Christmas has already been captured for the ages. Advent hymns should have a sense of longing, expectation and waiting.

And, said Peter Latona, director of music at Washington's Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the type of Advent music that gives him "goosebumps" should also look with hope to the end of time.

"That's what all the good Advent texts have in them -- the second coming and the role of Jesus as savior, not just the baby in the crib," he said.

Many evangelical and nondenominational churches, meanwhile, don't follow a liturgical calendar. That means they usher in Christmas music as soon as Thanksgiving has come and gone.