Traditional churches that follow the church calendar and set readings suffer from a kind of schizophrenia at this time of the year. It may not be obvious to an outsider but at a time when the shops are geared up for Christmas, carols are playing in the shops and on the street and we are getting into the Christmas party season that is not where the churches' focus lies.

You wouldn't readily notice this because, like everyone else, they have to nod towards the commercial pressure and the inevitable build up that comes earlier every year.  So they will build in the early carol services, the Christingle services and everything that goes with celebrating Christmas early. Christmas is the most popular Christian Festival and the one that pulls people in, even if those who wouldn't think of coming to church the rest of the year so why wouldn't the churches jump on the bandwagon?

There is no good reason to assume Christ was born on 25th or even in the month of December. This was simply a convenient date, in the depths of winter, that people were accustomed to celebrating and that the Church could pin its celebrations to. Much of what we celebrate at Christmas isn't Christian in origin. The Church has adapted pagan and pre Christian celebrations to its own ends. There was a point in British history under Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans when Christmas was actually banned.

Much of what we celebrate as a traditional Christmas goes back only as far as Victorian times but you only need refer to Dicken's Christmas Carol to realise it was shorter, sharper festival than we have now; the big day itself and perhaps Boxing Day when it was traditional to give boxes to servants and give them a day off to return to their families. The weeks of build up to Christmas are a modern and commercial invention designed to maximise consumption and spending.

You will know perhaps that Advent is the period of preparation for Christmas but the truth is it was a very different 'preparation' than the one we have come to know. In the church's traditional calendar the four week period before Christmas has a similar relationship to Christmas Day and the twelve day festival that comes after it as Lent does to Easter. It is a time of spiritual presentation and not traditionally for the coming of the Christ child but his coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead at the end of time.

The church will slip in extra services, as I have said, and may risk a Christmas Hymn (seldom a jolly carol) in the main service. The children will probably be drawing Kings and Shepherds and getting ready to dress up as angels but the tenor of the set readings and often, by extension, the sermons, is quite different. You'll get some Old Testament Isiah but that's as Christmasy as it gets. The readings are rather about two men in a field, one of whom is taken and the other left or about the wise virgins who kept their lamps trimmed for the return of the master. The message is less about a vulnerable child in a manger than about preparing for judgement and the end times.

This is a 'hard sell' so its understandable that the traditional message plays out somewhere below the surface of cosy sentimentality; but it feels to me that the abandonment of the Church's calendar, the alternating periods of feast and preparatory famine that mirrored the seasons of the year; coupled with our separation from nature and appreciation for the seasons means something is lost.

Our lives are driven and shaped instead by commercial imperatives; so much so that by 26th December most of the shops are stripped of their decorations in preparation for the sales and many of us breath a sigh of relief that it is 'over for another year' and are only too happy to take our own decorations down too. Mine will not be coming down until twelfth night, January 6th when we celebrate the arrival of the Kings at the stable and the celebration of Epiphany, as the Christ child is presented at last to the gentile world.

I will trot along with the accustomed build up, as we all do, but in my head I am just a little bit out of step. this is expressed (possibly more entertainingly?) in my poem the Kings and the Curtain Rail in the Second Wind collection.