Advent

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.

Several of the season's best-known customs are more recent than the season itself. The Advent wreath, four candles in a ring of greenery lit one per week, is a nineteenth-century Lutheran development from Germany, popularised by the Hamburg pastor Johann Hinrich Wichern, who is credited with an early ring of candles for the children in his mission house. The Advent calendar, counting the days to Christmas behind small doors, is likewise a German innovation of around 1900.

Older and more central to the liturgy are the "O Antiphons", the seven great antiphons sung at Vespers on 17-23 December, each addressing Christ under a title drawn from the Hebrew prophets (O Wisdom, O Adonai, O Root of Jesse, and so on); their initials read backward spell a Latin acrostic, ero cras, "tomorrow I will be there". The hymn "O come, O come, Emmanuel" is a versification of them. The third Sunday, Gaudete, relaxes the penitential tone with rose vestments and a call to rejoice, a foretaste of the coming feast.