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Christmas was once a profoundly important season of Christian worship. Then it became a time of charity. Then a festival of shopping. And now a political weapon. It is time to resist the deterioration of the meaning of Christmas. Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we?

For Christians, Christmas is the second most important holy day of the Christian year, after Easter. The importance of both holidays (holy days) is demonstrated by the way the historic church calendar precedes each with a long season of preparation. Then in both cases the festival day is followed by a period of celebration. So this means that the holy day, in each case, is bracketed by weeks of preparation and celebration that mark a break from ordinary time.

Unless you are deeply immersed in the rhythms of a traditional liturgical church, you won’t know that what is often called “the Christmas season” is actually Advent, a four-week season of preparation for the coming of Christ. Christian tradition uses Advent to train adherents to ready their hearts for Christ’s birth through a lengthy, quiet period of reflection.

During Advent’s daily worship and study practices, we think about the history of Israel, the prophetic promises of a coming Messiah and, finally, what the New Testament tells us about the events preceding and surrounding the birth of Jesus. Catholics, especially, linger over the role of Jesus’ Mother Mary in God’s salvation plan.

The church instructs believers to use the Advent time to consider the state of our hearts and to ready ourselves once again to allow Jesus to make a dwelling place there. At Advent, we also are invited again to anticipate that great day when Jesus, as the creeds say, “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” So over these four Advent weeks, Christian minds and hearts roam across the holy past, the choices of the present, and the promises of God’s future of complete redemption and divine rule.

Just like with the 40-day Lenten period before Easter, Advent is a season of penitence — a season of sorrow for our sins and resolve to live a godlier life. That’s because we remember that Jesus entered human history as God’s answer to the problem of human sin. The Father sent the Son into the world to redeem the world. Jesus spent his short earthly life ministering to sinful human beings and suffering the effects of human evil. His suffering culminates on the cruel Cross of Calvary.

As Christians gaze at baby Jesus in the manger, we are rightly reminded of the entire biblical narrative. We recall that from Genesis forward it tells of humanity gone wrong, of God’s efforts to redeem humanity. We never forget that the holy baby grows up to become the crucified Jesus of Good Friday. Penitence at the cost of our sins is only right – as is a training of our desire to be his faithful disciples.

After Christmas Day (in the Catholic calendar, it’s called “The Nativity of our Lord”), the Church moves into the “twelve days of Christmas.” This marks the period up to January 6, or Epiphany, the time when Jesus was manifested to the Gentiles — better known as the day when the “wise men from the East” reached him with their famous gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Only then is the Christmas season over. It ends with hearty celebration.

It has been a very, very long time since western cultures were so suffused by Christian sensibility that the liturgical calendar truly shaped the cultural celebration of Christmas. What most Americans understand the “Christmas season” to be has cut loose almost entirely from the practices just described.

Advent has been replaced by the Christmas shopping season, which is generally marked by the first moments that gosh-awful Christmas music is piped into the stores – sometimes as early as September. Americans spend months being inundated by advertising intended to trigger our desire to give, and to receive, bigger, badder, better presents.

The transformation of Christmas into the major shopping season of the year has been a boon to everyone who sells stuff. In the United States alone, the Christmas season generates $3 trillion in sales, about one-fifth all sales each year. The same pattern holds in many other nations. Market capitalism has become utterly dependent on one or two or even three months of intense shopping on the part of people now identified by their primary function as “consumers.”

Christmas more clearly reflects some derivative of its original meaning in its emphasis on charitable giving. This is perhaps most visibly symbolized by the Salvation Army bell-ringers collecting donations outside stores. The emphasis on charitable giving has certainly been aided by the happy proximity of Christmas to the end of the calendar year. All kinds of charities reach out to all kinds of potential givers at this time of year, soliciting year-end gifts as people get their tax situation in order at the end of each year.

The lovely idea that “God gave the very best gift of all,”