You can always rely on the R4 audience to be as pedantic as you want. But this I am not only feeling pedantic but grumpy about Advent.
The thing is I like Advent. It is in many ways my favourite season of the church year. I like the bleakness and the building tension; I love the hymns and the focus not only on the first coming, but primarily on the second coming. What I loathe is the way that the Advent season has become the Christmas season. Trees go up on Dec 1st (I came back to Cambridge on Sunday to find my housemate had already put ours up), lights are switched on, carols are sung. And the effect is that by Dec 25th, everyone's had enough and is quite glad it will all be over. So that the Christmas season itself is thoroughly miserable.
Bah, humbug indeed. Although I prefer the Christmas season starting at the beginning of Advent to before Halloween, which is when the shops want it to start!
Oh I know. It takes away all the glorious anticipatation.
Decorations at home should only go up the week before.
The odd carol service in late December is OK (or if student at end of term which, in Oxford could quite often be first week of December - but it still felt like something was coming to a conculusion - then of course there was a break before it all started again at home)
I did grump about the lights going up on Oxford St in mid-November. Although I did then go 'ah, pretty'. At least leave it till December.
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... has a lot to do with it.
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The thing is I like Advent. It is in many ways my favourite season of the church year. I like the bleakness and the building tension; I love the hymns and the focus not only on the first coming, but primarily on the second coming. What I loathe is the way that the Advent season has become the Christmas season. Trees go up on Dec 1st (I came back to Cambridge on Sunday to find my housemate had already put ours up), lights are switched on, carols are sung. And the effect is that by Dec 25th, everyone's had enough and is quite glad it will all be over. So that the Christmas season itself is thoroughly miserable.
Bah, humbug.
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Decorations at home should only go up the week before.
The odd carol service in late December is OK (or if student at end of term which, in Oxford could quite often be first week of December - but it still felt like something was coming to a conculusion - then of course there was a break before it all started again at home)
I did grump about the lights going up on Oxford St in mid-November. Although I did then go 'ah, pretty'. At least leave it till December.
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