What Is Advent? The Season of Waiting Explained — History, Meaning, and How to Observe It

Advent begins the Sunday closest to November 30 and runs for the four Sundays before Christmas. It's one of the two major penitential seasons in the Christian liturgical calendar — the other being Lent.

And it's almost entirely misunderstood in modern evangelical culture, where it's either ignored or used as a synonym for the Christmas season itself.

Advent is not Christmas. Advent is the waiting before Christmas. And that distinction matters more than it might seem.

The Word and the History

"Advent" comes from the Latin adventus — arrival, coming. The season was established in the Western church by the 6th century, originally as a penitential fast in preparation for Christmas, mirroring Lent's preparation for Easter. Its character has been debated and developed since — more somber in the West, with themes of waiting, repentance, and longing; more festive in some Eastern traditions.

The four Sundays of Advent are traditionally associated with four themes (varying by tradition):

• Week 1: Hope (the prophets' expectation of the Messiah)
• Week 2: Peace (preparation for his coming)
• Week 3: Joy (Gaudete Sunday — rose/pink candle — a moment of rejoicing midway through the waiting)
• Week 4: Love (Mary's faith and the imminence of Christ's birth)

The Double Advent: Past and Future

Advent has a distinctive two-directional character. It remembers the first coming of Christ (the Incarnation, Christmas) and anticipates the second coming (the Parousia, the return of Christ to complete what he began).

This is what makes Advent theologically interesting: it refuses to let Christmas be simply a nostalgic celebration of a past event. It holds Christmas in tension with its not-yet completion.

We live between the two advents. Christ has come. Christ will come again. Advent is the church's annual immersion into that "between" — learning to live as a people who wait, who hope, who have not yet seen the fullness of what God has promised.

The Maranatha prayer — "Come, Lord Jesus" (Revelation 22:20, 1 Corinthians 16:22) — is Advent's heartbeat. We are still waiting for something. The world is not yet what it will be. The resurrection has happened; the resurrection of all things has not.

Why Waiting Is Spiritually Significant

The dominant posture of Advent is waiting. And waiting is one of the hardest spiritual postures for modern Westerners.

We are bad at waiting. We fill every silence with noise. We scroll away discomfort. We expect immediate delivery, on-demand entertainment, instant communication. Waiting feels like failure — a sign that something has gone wrong.

Advent challenges this. It says: the waiting is not failure. The waiting is the shape of faith between promise and fulfillment. Abraham waited. Israel waited in exile. The prophets waited. The disciples waited in the upper room. The church has always been a waiting community.

Psalm 27:14: "Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD." Isaiah 40:31: "Those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength." The posture of waiting is not passive resignation — it's active, trusting attention.

Advent, if practiced well, trains the soul in the theology of hope. You learn to live rightly in the "not yet." That's a formation that matters far beyond December.

How to Observe Advent

The Advent Wreath

An Advent wreath is a circle of evergreen (symbolizing eternal life) with four candles around the outside and sometimes a fifth (white) candle in the center (the Christ candle, lit on Christmas Day).

Each Sunday of Advent, one additional candle is lit — traditionally:

• Week 1: Purple (hope or prophecy)
• Week 2: Purple (peace or Bethlehem)
• Week 3: Pink/Rose (joy or shepherds — Gaudete Sunday)
• Week 4: Purple (love or angels)

The lighting of the candle each week, perhaps accompanied by a short reading and prayer, creates a tangible, embodied experience of time passing toward Christmas — the light increasing as the season progresses.

Daily Readings

The traditional Daily Office lectionary provides morning and evening Scripture readings throughout Advent, focusing on the prophetic texts of the Old Testament (especially Isaiah), the Gospel infancy narratives, and John's Gospel prologue. These readings give Advent its particular character.

Apps: Laudate, Universalis, DailyOffice.org provide daily Advent readings.

An Advent Devotional

Numerous Advent devotionals structure daily readings and reflections for the season. Particularly good ones:

• Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (Plough) — essays by Barth, Bonhoeffer, Luther, Lewis, and others
• God Is in the Manger (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) — brief daily reflections from Bonhoeffer's letters and sermons
• Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus (Nancy Guthrie) — theologically rich daily readings

Fasting and Simplicity

The original character of Advent was penitential — a fasting season. You don't have to adopt the full medieval practice, but the countercultural posture of Advent is marked by intentional simplicity against the consumerist excess of the cultural Christmas season.

This might mean: limiting gift lists, giving to charity instead of buying gifts, avoiding Christmas music and decorations until Christmas Eve, using the extra time and attention not for shopping but for prayer and service.

The discipline is not grumpiness or rejection of celebration — it's preserving the joy of Christmas by not exhausting it in the weeks before.

The O Antiphons

The seven days before Christmas Eve (December 17-23) are traditionally marked by the "O Antiphons" — ancient liturgical calls to Christ using seven of his messianic titles:

• O Sapientia (O Wisdom)
• O Adonai (O Lord of Israel)
• O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse)
• O Clavis David (O Key of David)
• O Oriens (O Dayspring)
• O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations)
• O Emmanuel (O God with us)

The famous Advent hymn "O Come O Come Emmanuel" is based directly on these antiphons. Singing it in Advent — especially in the last week before Christmas — connects you to 1,500 years of the church's longing prayer.

When Christmas Actually Begins

In the liturgical calendar, Christmas is a twelve-day season (December 25 through January 5 — the "Twelve Days of Christmas"). It begins at sundown on Christmas Eve and culminates in Epiphany (January 6), when the arrival of the Magi is celebrated.

Advent, therefore, is not the Christmas season — it's the season before Christmas. This is why traditional practice saves Christmas music, decorations, and celebration for Christmas itself, rather than the entire month of December. The arrival is more joyful when you've actually been waiting.

"When you've been waiting in the dark, the light means more."

That's the spiritual logic of Advent. And it's one the church has practiced for fifteen centuries.

Related: What Is Lent? | Holy Week Guide