'Joy to the World' Isn't a Christmas Carol

We’ve marked the beginning of a new Church year by starting again in Advent, the first season of the liturgical calendar. Like a hapless Black Friday shopper thrown to the ground by the crazed masses surging around him, Advent usually gets trampled in our culture’s mad rush towards Christmas, and Christians are by no means immune to this trend. At the Christian college I attended, the college radio station began playing Christmas songs 24/7 on the day after Thanksgiving and continued to play them around the clock without exception until December 25th. When I was a freshman, this didn’t strike me as odd; but over the next three years I began learning about the church seasons at the Anglican church I attended, and by my senior year all that Christmas music during Advent became unbearable. When I recently received a lovely Advent-themed devotional from my alma mater in the mail, I wondered if perhaps they had changed their Christmas music policy over at the radio station, so a few days after Thanksgiving I checked the radio station’s live stream. To my chagrin, it was playing “O Christmas Tree.”