This column was syndicated by Scripps Howard News Service on 12/12/2007

There was a time when Christians did not celebrate a season that could be

called the 30-something days of Christmas.

In the year of our Lord 1939, the National Retail Dry Goods Association

asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving to the

next-to-last Thursday in November. This was strategic, since President

Abraham Lincoln had proclaimed the last Thursday of the month as the

official holiday. This meant that Thanksgiving was occasionally delayed

until a fifth Thursday -- a cruel blow to merchants.

Confusion reigned until Congress reached a compromise and, since 1942,

Thanksgiving has been observed on the fourth Thursday in November.

And thus was born America's most powerful and all-consuming season. This

later evolved into the shopping festival called "The Holidays," which in

the past generation has started creeping into stores days or weeks before

Turkey Day.

"None of this, of course, has anything to do with the Christmas traditions

that Christians have been observing through the ages," said Teresa Berger,

professor of liturgical studies at Yale Divinity School.

To be candid, she said, it does "help to remember that celebrations of

Christmas and other holy seasons have always been affected by what happens

in the marketplace and the surrounding culture. ... But that isn't what we

are seeing, today. The question now is whether or not the shopping mall

will define what is Christmas for most Christians."

Here's the bottom line. For centuries, Christmas was a 12-day season that

began on Dec. 25th and ended on Jan. 6th with the celebration of the Feast

of the Epiphany. Thus, the season of Christmas followed Christmas Day, with

most people preparing for the holy day in a festive blitz during the final

days or even hours, with many stores staying open until midnight on

Christmas Eve.

Today, everything has been flipped around, with the Christmas or Holiday

season preceding Dec. 25.

For most Americans, this season begins with an explosion of shopping on

Black Friday after Thanksgiving, followed by a flurry of office parties

and school events packed into early December. The goal is to hold as many

of these events as possible long before the onset of the complicated

travel schedules that shape the lives of many individuals and families.

Meanwhile, television networks, radio stations and newspapers have created

their own versions of the "12 days of Christmas," inserting them before --

often long before -- Dec. 25 as a secular framework for advertising

campaigns, civic charity projects, holiday music marathons, parades,

house-decorating competitions and waves of mushy movies, old and new.

 Needless to say, this is not the Christmas that Berger knew as she grew

up in Germany in the post-World War II era. As a Catholic, the days

between Christmas and Epiphany were marked by a series of events -- such

as the feasts of St. Stephen and St. John the Evangelist -- that were

accompanied by their own rites and customs. Lutherans and other Christians

had their own traditions for marking this time.

"When people talk about a season called the 'Twelve Days of Christmas,'

they are primarily talking about something that was much more common in

England," said Berger. "There are many reasons for that, not the least of

which was the popularity of the song by that name."

While these traditions took various forms, the key was that the religious

elements of the season remained intact. Christians celebrated Christmas

during Christmas.

Berger said that it still makes her a bit uncomfortable when she sees

families putting up and decorating their Christmas trees before they are

even finished using the candles and green wreathes associated with the

penitential season of Advent, which begins on the fourth Sunday before

Christmas. There are many more people, of course, who do not observe

Advent, which is called Nativity Lent in Orthodox churches.

"Today, people believe they can have whatever they want, when they want

it, and Christmas becomes whatever the culture says that it is," she said.

"We can, however, revolt against this. We can choose, for example, not to

send out 1,000 mindless Christmas cards. We can sit down and write our own

cards and even breathe a prayer for the people we love while we do that.

"No one can force us to live according to the laws of the new Christmas.

We can make our own choices."

Terry Mattingly (www.tmatt.net) directs the Washington Journalism Center

at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. He writes this

weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service.