Why I love the liturgical cycle, because of insights like this one:
I have often thought of December as being the last month of the
year. The perception has, I suppose, been tacitly reinforced by any number of
calendars I’ve owned. But just looking at the world around me, calendars aside,
I was particularly struck last month at how very deathlike the landscape (in
the northern hemisphere) becomes during November, an ending of sorts. And then
as November wrapped up, edging into December, we welcomed our first big
snowfall, and the world was all fresh and new. I imagine this is probably
obvious to most people, but it really hit me for the first time that there is a
natural, visible logic in the fact that many Christian traditions hold November
to be the month of the dead. And it’s also interesting that many Christian
traditions’ “liturgical year” is slightly offset from the secular year, with
about a month separating their respective New Years. It’s like the offset
between the geographic north pole and the magnetic north pole. Both are real;
both are useful — but the Earth only spins around one of them.
It's also why I detest the Elf on the Shelf phenomenon. Santa is real; your marketing gimmick (designed by scientific materialists to emphasize their false claim that Santa is also a marketing gimmick) is not real.
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