A long way removed from days of penitence and black bread

We’ve been slipping quite seamlessly into the days of darkest mid-Winter with the season of Advent having arrived on December’s first Sunday this year.  Advent always begins on the fourth Sunday that falls before Christmas Day, which on any given year can be between November 27th and December 3rd, and it marks the beginning of another Church Year.

Back the years, it had a kind of Lenten tinge to it, when, as young Mass servers, we were reminded to display an extra measure of solemnity during the Sundays of December.

Striking shades of purple and blue were – and still are – worn by the priests as we were reminded of the need to do our duties that bit more diligently in the run-up to the feast of Christmas.

Advent, according to my little research probes, derives from the Latin word of Adventus which means coming, but the origin of the Christian event is thought to date back to around the 6th or 5th centuries.

Until relatively recent times, the first Sunday of Advent certainly didn’t coincide with the beginning of the ‘commercial Christmas’ which always had its traditional start on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

Those days are of course long gone and the build-up to the season of Christmas – at least in the world of retail sales – now begins from almost the very moment that the Halloween masks have been taken down for another year.

Apart from the odd lengthy sermon on the need for some extra piety in the run-up to Christmas, there was never any sense of the same need for penance, fast or abstinence that were associated with the pre-Easter Lenten period of penitence.

One of the big traditions in rural Ireland in the run-up to Advent was in the killing of the pig on St. Martin’s Day, November 11th, which would usher in a period of some feasting with the consumption of fresh pork for a couple of weeks, before a return to the salty bacon days from the big tea chest in one of the house’s natural cold rooms.

For what it’s worth, St. Martin sprung to fame back in the fourth century when as a Roman soldier in 337AD he cut his cloak in two, and gave half of it to a freezing vagrant before subsequently giving up his military career to pursue a monastic life of prayer and preaching with a string of miracles to his name as well.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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