Advent

Advent is the season that opens the Church’s year. It begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and ends at nightfall on Christmas Eve, running between twenty-two and twenty-eight days depending on where the Sundays fall.

It looks backward and forward at once, and that double focus is the whole character of the season. The first half turns toward Christ’s coming at the end of time. Only in the second half, from December 17, does the liturgy turn decisively toward Bethlehem. Advent is not four weeks of Christmas. It is four weeks of waiting, and the waiting is the practice.

The wreath is the most familiar sign of it: an evergreen circle with four candles, one lit for each Sunday, so the light in the room grows week by week. Three candles are violet and one is rose. The rose candle is lit on the third Sunday, Gaudete Sunday, named for the opening word of that day’s liturgy, which means rejoice. Halfway through, the Church lifts the tone briefly, exactly as it does on Laetare Sunday in Lent.

Violet is the colour of the season, the same as Lent, and for a related reason: this is a period of preparation with a penitential edge. But the edge is gentler here. Advent is not a fast. It is an unhurrying, and in a culture that begins celebrating Christmas in November it has become one of the harder disciplines the Church asks for, precisely because it asks you to wait while everyone around you has already started.

There are no obligatory fasts or abstinences in Advent in the Latin Church. It is a season of preparation rather than penance in the strict sense, and the older tradition of fasting through Advent survives now only as a custom.

The Sundays of Advent carry the ordinary Sunday obligation. Christmas Day itself is a holy day of obligation, and a Mass celebrated on the evening of December 24 fulfils it.

In many countries the Immaculate Conception on December 8 falls inside Advent and is a holy day of obligation. Whether it obliges varies by country, so check locally.

The Gloria is omitted at Sunday Mass through Advent, which is why its return on Christmas night lands the way it does.

In Spanish, with the December feasts of Mexico and Latin America: Adviento 2026.

In Portuguese, for Brazil: Advento 2026.

The single most effective thing you can do with Advent is to not start Christmas early at home. Keep the tree bare for a week, or put the crib out empty and leave the manger unfilled until the night itself. Children remember the empty manger far longer than the full one.

Light the wreath at the same time each week, ideally before a meal, and let it be short. Four weeks of two minutes will hold. Twenty minutes will not survive the second Sunday.

The daily readings of Advent are among the most beautiful in the year, and they are short. Ten minutes with the day’s Gospel, at the same hour, is a complete Advent practice on its own.

Go to confession before Christmas rather than after. Parishes schedule extra times in the third week for exactly this, and the queues are shortest early.

And if the season arrives and you have not prepared anything, start on whichever Sunday you notice. Advent forgives a late start more easily than almost any other season, because waiting is something you can begin at any point.