After Thanksgiving this year and the celebration of the Feast of Christ the King, the Church’s calendar brings us to Advent, a season when we recall God’s promise of a Messiah to restore us to friendship with God after original sin. Thus we prepare for the celebration of the Feast of the Incarnation, Christmas Day. This is also a time when we prepare to receive Christ into our own lives, which is perhaps the most important goal and purpose of Advent.

Unfortunately, it seems that merchandising has managed to take over Advent. Sometimes the days of Advent are too filled with tasks and spending to the point where, as a recent news article stated, some 45 percent of Americans would, if they could, skip Christmas and the holiday season because of the emotional, financial and social stress it causes them.

Against this, the Church gives us this period of several weeks between the end of the liturgical year and the Feast of Christmas to think about the things that are important about the Christmas season that can’t be purchased, baked or packaged. The Church gives us this time to reform our hearts and to be prepared to acknowledge the coming of the Prince of Peace and to take up his cause for our own welfare and that of the world. It is an easy season to forget, what with the demands of social engagements, shopping, decorations and all the rest of it that go with Christmas, that in a simpler time were more simply done and perhaps better.

As we are surrounded, or perhaps overwhelmed, by the glitz being promoted as Christmas, we should remember that Jesus chose, among all the modalities he might have picked for the incarnation, to come into the world as a poor child of poor parents. He chose to live his life, the bulk of it, largely in the obscurity of an artisan in a small village, in an insignificant country in the Mediterranean world. He could have come as an emperor, grand potentate or great politician. Jesus chose instead to be known as the carpenter’s son, the son of Joseph and Mary, the simple artisan of whom it was derisively said, could any good come out of Nazareth. And yet we know that the teaching and the life of Jesus edified billions of people since the simple fact of his birth in Bethlehem of Judea two millennia ago.

I do not blush to say that Christmas should make us look at the economic realities we face with the eyes of Catholic people. It is important that we recognize that economic injustices do exist and that for many, economic equality is not only difficult but in some cases, impossible. We have to realize that as in every age, so in this, the poor are least able to deal with current conditions and the most likely to be affected adversely and for a long time by their circumstances.

If there is any time in the world that we should direct our attention with love to the poor, it is Christmas time, peace on earth to all men of good will, including even those whose acquaintance we normally do not have or seek in the ordinary course of our lives. And in order to do that we must use this holy season of Advent to fill ourselves with the immense goodness of God, who despite the disobedience of our first parents did not forget us. Instead our God offered us a savior who is Christ the Lord. His birth, attended by the songs of the choirs of angels, should accompany his coming into our hearts with an equal sense of joy and commitment to the way of life which he told us, if we follow, it will surely keep us safe.