A Season That Faces Two Directions

Advent is the four-week season that opens the Western liturgical year, beginning on the Sunday nearest 30 November (the feast of Andrew) and running to Christmas Eve. Its name, from the Latin adventus, "coming", captures a deliberate double focus that distinguishes it from a simple countdown to Christmas: the season looks back to the first coming of Christ at Bethlehem and forward to the promised second coming in glory, and the earlier Sundays lean toward the latter. The mood is watchful and penitential rather than festive; the liturgical colour is violet (or, in some uses, blue), the Gloria is omitted, and older custom restrained music and marriage celebrations.

The season took shape in Gaul and Spain between roughly the fourth and sixth centuries, at first as a longer fast modelled on Lent (a "St Martin's Lent" from 11 November), and was later shortened and regularised at Rome to four Sundays. The Eastern churches keep a parallel but distinct forty-day Nativity Fast.