WHAT IS ADVENT FOR?

A brief, semi-personal history of Bublé season

Thanks for reading this (free) post. If you’re stuck for Christmas gift ideas this year, do please consider one of these.

---

The first job I ever had was killing turkeys for Christmas. I was 12 or perhaps 13 years old. We lived in a small village in the English countryside, and during the month before Christmas I would get up early in the morning, pull on a pair of dark blue overalls and rubber wellies, then walk or cycle the mile from our house to the farm where the killing shed lay.

The day’s work was cold and hard on the hands. The turkeys had been reared since the late summer in large, high-ceilinged barns strewn with rough straw. As they grew they had been segregated into classes by weight. The biggest weighed as much as 45kg (~100lbs). The tiddlers came in closer to 6 or 7kgs (12-15lbs).

The farmer was also the village butcher, and the birds we picked to die on any given day depended somewhat on what orders Mr. Cross had coming in to the shop. Usually at the start of the month the biggest were slaughtered, since they were typically sent off to pubs and restaurants where hundreds of Christmas diners might be served from late November onwards.

The smallest had a stay of execution until much closer to December 25th.

Usually the last day we worked was Christmas Eve, but by then all the sheds had been silent for almost a week, the thousands of once-live birds now hanging from long rails, oozing death-thick blood from their beaks onto the straw in which they once fussed and pecked. The job in the week before Christmas was butchering: cutting off heads and feet and pulling out guts and skinning necks and putting hearts and livers into little plastic bags for feasting families to make stock for their gravy.

It was grisly work, but I didn’t mind it. There was always something to do and it made you think hard about what being an omnivorous human being was. When I started, my job was plucking feathers from the still-warm dead birds, a task that raised blisters quickly on the inside of your thumbs and index fingers. As I got older, I was trusted with weighing the birds, labelling and recording the stock. A year or so after that, I graduated to cutting throats.

I can vividly remember walking home along the lane for lunch on dank and misty December days, my overalls plastered in treacly blood and brown-yellow shit and tiny white feathers. Hosing myself down with freezing water from the cold-water tap around the side of the house and scrubbing my smelly hands and leaving my rank, stinking clothes outside while I popped indoors for a sandwich.

That was my Advent. The memories have never left me.

Where does Advent come from? Self-evidently it cannot have preceded the time when Christmas was given a firm date. In other words, the Middle Ages.

During Roman times there was a series of pagan festivals clustered around the winter solstice (December 21st). In the late fourth century AD - a generation or two after the formal adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire - these were elided with the celebration of Christ’s nativity, which was assigned to December 25th.

Over the centuries that followed, as Christianity matured and Christendom came to replace Roman imperium as the binding cultural institution in the Mediterranean and northern European worlds, Christmas began to accrue traditions. These included variations on over-eating and -drinking, decorating homes and communal spaces with evergreen plants, and burning things.

By the high Middle Ages, pantomime performances of the Biblical Nativity - complete with Mary and Joseph, the Magi and a child massacre - had become part of Christmas celebrations, and people had begun to indulge in competitive gift-giving across the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany.

Or to put it another way, Christmas was popping off. So it is not surprising that there had developed in parallel a tradition of pre-Christmas contemplation and fasting. The calm before the storm. Advent.

Advent did not follow far behind Christmas. However, it was not immediately conceived as the two-dozen days that now appear on most chocolate Advent calendars.

Writing in the sixth century AD, Gregory of Tours suggested that the season before Christmas was a sort of second Lent - a 40-day period of intermittent fasting beginning in mid-November. But around the same time Pope Gregory the Great implied that Advent comprised four weeks.

Even by the later Middle Ages this variance had still not entirely settled down - Advent was variously defined as starting with the feast of St Martin (11 November) or the feast of St Andrew (20 November).

In the Church of England services I remember from my schooldays - not quite in the Middle Ages, although sometimes it now feels that long ago - Advent began on the fourth Sunday out from Christmas, which was generally in the last days of November or first of December.

I suppose the broadest point here is that all feasts are to some degree moveable. The principle, however, was that Advent was a time of anticipation and contemplation of the mystery of the Nativity to come. Across the Middle Ages some people fasted, while others steadily cranked up their partying so that they were peaking at Christmas.

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written in the fourteenth century, there is an amusing juxtaposition of these two attitudes, as knights in King Arthur’s court spend the supposedly abstemious Advent period getting stuck into food and booze as though this is what December was made for.

I suppose that principle still holds today. There have been years where I’ve spent December 1-24 eating well and working out before letting loose at Christmas, and others where I’ve been in the gutter bawling Michael Bublé numbers and The Fairytale of New York from day one.

Either way, when we observe Advent, however we do observe it, we are reaching back into the earliest history of Christianity. There is real cultural connective tissue joining us with our medieval ancestors, and though in many ways our worlds would look almost unrecognisable if we could time-travel between them, there would still be moments when we knew exactly where we were.

Look after yourselves out there.