12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS: Waiting part of religious observance

Kim Welch and her family don’t “do Santa.”

Pamela Lichtenwalner probably won’t start sending her holiday cards until Christmas Eve. The Cumming mother of six is not a procrastinator. She does it on purpose.

“I like sending and getting Christmas cards after Christmas Day,” Lichtenwalner said, “because it’s still Christmas.”

Welch and Lichtenwalner are two of a minority of Christians, among them Anglicans, Catholics and Lutherans, who celebrate a traditional 12-day Christmas season.

These observers don’t rush to the malls on Black Friday or buy and decorate trees the weekend after Thanksgiving. They tend to avoid mid-December Christmas parties. They try to ignore the storefront Santa displays and loudspeakers prematurely blaring “Silent Night.”

On Dec. 26 you won’t find trees in their garbage cans.

“I am always sad when I see people out on Christmas afternoon taking down their lights and dragging their Christmas trees out to the curb for pickup,” said Bishop J. Neil Alexander of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta. “The 12 days of Christmas begins, not ends, on Christmas Day.”

Alexander is the author of “Waiting for the Coming: The Liturgical Meaning of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany.” He laments the co-opting of Advent and the shortening of Christmas by what he calls an “American commercial season in semireligious trappings.”

On the Christian calendar, Advent takes place the four Sundays before Christmas Day. It is not meant as a time to go on shopping sprees and eggnog binges, traditionalists argue. Instead, Advent is when Christians wait and prepare for the coming of the infant Christ.

Advent is followed by Christmas, which starts on Dec. 25 and lasts until “Twelfth Night” on Jan. 5. The following day is Epiphany, the celebration of the arrival of the magi at the manger in Bethlehem.

“The point of Advent is to drive home the spiritual reason why we’re celebrating Christmas,” Lichtenwalner said.

Lichtenwalner says she delays bringing out the Christmas decorations until after the third week of Advent. Welch, who lives in Alpharetta with her husband, Ron, and their four sons, observes another tradition by keeping a small “Jesse Tree” during December. Her sons take turns adorning it with an Old Testament ornament every day during Advent.

Alexander, who typically doesn’t raise and decorate a tree until Christmas Eve, believes “keeping the great feast of the Nativity and incarnation in celebration is far more meaningful than the seasonal rat race of preparing to give things to each other most of us don’t really need.”

The Lichtenwalners and the Welches, who both attend St. Benedict’s Catholic Church in Duluth, keep Christmas simple. The Welch boys don’t get stockings on Christmas Day, they receive them Dec. 6, St. Nicholas Day.

“The Christmas Day gifts are minimal,” Kim Welch said. “There’s no getting up in the morning and tearing up presents.”

A few years back, the Lichtenwalners experimented with opening just one present on each of the 12 days of Christmas. It was fun, Pamela Lichtenwalner said, but they didn’t repeat it because her children “typically don’t get that many presents.”

Lichtenwalner said her family spends the 12 days “eating a lot and visiting family and friends.”

Welch allows her children to have one treat a day, instead of Sunday dessert only.

Welch believes others who observe the more popular American Christmas could benefit greatly from trying her tradition, especially during a bad economy.

“Mary and Joseph weren’t rich. They just trusted in God to provide for them,” she said. “I’m hoping that this Christmas will bring more people to the beauty and simplicity of the manger … if big Santa will get out of the way.”