December 27, 2023

I know it’s not Advent anymore and that we’re still in the 12 Days of Christmas.  Those who object to singing Christmas carols during Advent will surely not appreciate my intrusion of an Advent observance into Christmas.  But please bear with me and hear me out just this once.

I came across a description of the invention of the Advent Calendar from my fellow Patheos blogger Tosha Lamdin Williams.   In a moving post about how ordinary Christians doing ordinary things with their families can have an impact far beyond what they realize, she writes,

As a child in Germany, a young Gerhard Lang had a creative or, at least, thoughtful mom. By this point in history, Advent was a fairly well-known religious tradition, especially in Europe. Yet, Gerhard’s mom took the burgeoning Advent tradition one step further. She created an Advent calendar marking each day of December with tasty treats. Whether these were cookies, meringues or German wibele, Gerhard got to enjoy one each December day leading up to Christmas. . . .

Her son Gerhard Lang grew up to publish the world‘s first commercially printed Advent calendar. And here’s the thing:  his original calendar was not focussed on elves or Santa, Christmas trees or secular traditions. Gerhard Lang’s Advent calendar was about the biblical Christmas story.

Seems that what Frau Lang had spoken into her child’s life as they celebrated Christmas when he was young became what he spoke into others’ lives as an adult. Ultimately, their family Christmas tradition ended up impacting the whole world.

Williams goes on to write about how when the Nazis took power in Germany, they destroyed the Christian Advent Calendars and replaced them with calendars that opened up to pictures of guns, tanks, and Nazi symbols.  They gave them freely to mothers, recognizing the influence mothers have in shaping their children.  She then turns to the Advent Calendars of today, many of which open up to consumer goods like chocolate, make-up, and alcohol, once again effacing the true meaning of Advent.

This got me interested in the subject, so I delved a little deeper.  At the history site Doing History in Public, Alex Wakelam wrote a post entitled The History of Advent Calendars.  Gerhard Lang, who is responsible for the innovation of calendars with opening doors, published his in the 1920s.  But his creative mother who gave him the idea was drawing on an earlier tradition.  Wakelam writes,

Like many others aspects of modern Christmas practices, the Advent calendar is of German origin. From the early nineteenth century, at the latest, German Protestants began to mark the days of Advent either by burning a candle for the day or, more simply, marking walls or doors with a line of chalk each day. A new practice of hanging a devotional image every day ultimately led to the creation of the first known handmade, wooden, Advent calendar in 1851.

Those German Protestants must have been Lutherans.  How do we know that?  There were many other kinds of Protestants in Germany–Reformed, United, Baptists, Anabaptists, and multiple sects of Pietists–so why credit this practice to the Lutherans?

Well, if any of these other Protestants celebrated Advent, as the Lutherans did, they surely would not hang a “devotional image” every day, something Lutherans would feel free enough in the Gospel to do.

P.S.:  Another post on the subject at Doing History in Public, a project of Cambridge graduate students in history confirms my deduction.

 

Illustration:  A Gerhard Lang Advent Calendar via PICRYL, Public Domain.  An accompanying description in German says that the windows when opened displayed a Christmas verse.  They could then be pasted over with pictures from a cutout sheet.  This copy is covered with the pictures. 

February 29, 2016

Do we need to reform the calendar to eliminate anomalies like Leap Year?

Two Johns Hopkins professors, Steve Hanke (an economist and fellow of the libertarian Cato Institute) and Dick Henry (a physicist and astronomer), have been proposing the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar.  It has the virtue of making every date fall on the same day each year.  Christmas, December 25, will always be on a Monday.  If your birthday is on a Saturday, it will always be on a Saturday.

There would be no leap year, no extra day every four years. What there will be to align the year with the earth’s orbit is a leap week every five or six years. This week will be added to the end of December.  It will function like a month and will be known as Xtr, pronounced “extra” and would doubtless become a great festival.

See an explanation of the new calendar, which the inventors hope to begin in 2018, after the jump.  The link will also take you to FAQs and the calendar itself.  After the jump you will also find my critique of the whole project. (more…)

November 13, 2014

The school board in Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D. C., has voted not to name the holidays associated with religions on the school calendar.

School will still be dismissed for Christmas, Easter, and the major Jewish holidays.  But when Muslims wanted time off for their holidays, the school board decided to think about holidays like this:  We aren’t observing the religious holidays; rather, we are dismissing classes when large numbers of students are likely to be absent.  So on the school calendar, instead of so much as mentioning “Christmas,” there is just a notice of “no class today.”

Is this silly, does it make sense, or should the schools dismiss classes for Islamic holidays too? (more…)

October 23, 2013

My friend and former colleague Joel Heck has been doing some exhaustive research on the life of C. S. Lewis.  He has put together a detailed chronology that you can see on his website.  On the basis of that work, Joel has prepared a C. S. Lewis calendar.  It isn’t tied to a particular year, so it can be used year after year, showing what the great Christian apologist, literary scholar, and fantasy writer was doing on any particular day.  After the jump, details about how to get one of these calendars. (more…)

December 18, 2012

Eastern Orthodox folks celebrate Christmas on a different day than we Western Christians do.  They don’t go along with the change in the calendar that was orchestrated by Pope Gregory XIII back in 1582 in order to re-align our calendar with the motions of the solar system.  The so-called Gregorian calendar was accepted throughout the European-heritage nations by 1752.  But the Eastern nations remained under the old Julian calendar.

What I didn’t know is that some Protestants also kept using the Julian calendar.  They could be found in Appalachia as late as the 20th century.  From the Kairos Quarterly, a publication of an Orthodox monastery in West Virginia, via Trystan Bloom at First Thoughts:

As a Russian Orthodox monastery which observes the Julian, or “old”, calendar, we were surprised to learn about Appalachian “Old Christmas”, which is a most solemn and reverent time for families living in the mountains. The initial change-over from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar by the British Empire and the American colonies in 1752 caused a difference of eleven days. Thus, the date of “new” Christmas on December 25th was eleven days ahead of “old” Christmas, which fell (at that time) on January 5th. Some Protestants refused to honor the new calendar because it was decreed by the Pope, so their celebration of Christmas remained on the Julian calendar – which now falls on January 7. In the Appalachian Mountains, the celebration of Old Christmas remained until about World War I. Though they might also observe ‘new’ Christmas on December 25th, the festivities were very different. December 25th was marked with revelry and parties and visiting, but January 6th was primarily a reverent family observance.

via Old Calendarists in Appalachia » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog.

I’m fascinated by such living relics of past history.  One of these days I intend to get on a boat and travel to Tangier Island here in Virginia in the Chesapeake Bay.  This island was settled by British colonists in 1686, and the people have been so isolated that to this day they still speak the English dialect of that day.  Which means they talk pretty much the way Shakespeare did.

January 6, 2010

Radio evangelist Harold Camping has calculated that the Rapture (the ascension of all living Christians before Christ returns) will occur on May 21, 2011. What interests me is how that date was figured:

By Camping's understanding, the Bible was dictated by God and every word and number carries a spiritual significance. He noticed that particular numbers appeared in the Bible at the same time particular themes are discussed.

The number 5, Camping concluded, equals "atonement." Ten is "completeness." Seventeen means "heaven." Camping patiently explained how he reached his conclusion for May 21, 2011.

"Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D.," he began. "Now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that's 1,978 years."

Camping then multiplied 1,978 by 365.2422 days – the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year.

Next, Camping noted that April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500.

Camping realized that (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500.

Or put into words: (Atonement x Completeness x Heaven), squared.

"Five times 10 times 17 is telling you a story," Camping said. "It's the story from the time Christ made payment for your sins until you're completely saved.

"I tell ya, I just about fell off my chair when I realized that," Camping said.

This is not the first time Camping has predicted the end times. His earlier calculation came to Sept. 6, 1994. His followers were unfazed and are making their plans not to be here after May 21, 2011. But doesn’t this new calculation start with the 2011 date and work backwards? (Not that this is the only thing wrong with this sort of thing.)

By the way, this is also the guy who proclaimed that Christians should leave their churches and just listen to preachers like him on the radio.


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