The Liturgical Year vs. The Commercial Calendar: Who Really Controls Your Time? by Jeff Callaway

The Liturgical Year vs. The Commercial Calendar: Who Really Controls Your Time?

by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

Time Is Sacred, Not Sold

Picture this: It's midnight on Thanksgiving. The turkey carcass still sits on the kitchen counter while a stampede of shoppers tears through department store aisles hunting Black Friday deals. Meanwhile, somewhere quiet in the darkness, a parishioner kneels before flickering candles during Advent, preparing her soul for the coming of Christ.

Two visions of time. Two masters. Two calendars competing for the same human heart.

Modern capitalism has colonized our calendar. This isn't just about cramming schedules with shopping seasons. This is about hijacking the very rhythm of Christian time itself. The marketplace doesn't just want your money. It wants your years, your weeks, your holy days. It wants to replace the Paschal Mystery with purchase orders, transform preparation into consumption, and convince you that salvation comes wrapped in a box with a bow.

The question isn't whether you'll follow a calendar. The question is which one: the Liturgical Calendar, where the Church shapes time around Christ, or the Commercial Calendar, where capitalism shapes time around cash.

The Church's Sacred Rhythm

The Liturgical Year is no arbitrary invention. According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, this annual cycle unfolds the entire mystery of Christ through seasons and feasts. It's rooted in salvation history, celebrating the Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and ongoing life of Jesus Christ. The Church doesn't just commemorate these events like historical footnotes. She invites us to participate in them, to live into them, to be transformed by them.

Throughout the liturgical year, the Church completes the education of the faithful through spiritual and bodily devotional practices, instruction, prayer, and works of penance and mercy. This isn't entertainment. This is formation. The liturgical calendar builds souls, not shopping carts.

Consider the seasons themselves, each with distinct purpose and meaning. Advent calls us to waiting and preparation for Christ, both His birth at Bethlehem and His Second Coming in glory. This is a penitential season historically marked by fasting, though most American Catholics have forgotten it. Christmas celebrates the Incarnation, God becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Ordinary Time focuses on growth in the life and teachings of Christ, the long stretches where we learn to walk with Him daily.

Then comes Lent, that forty-day penitential preparation for Easter, where we face our sins and turn back to God through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Holy Week and the Easter Triduum bring us to the Paschal Mystery itself: Christ's suffering, death, and resurrection. The Easter Season and Pentecost celebrate resurrection life and mission. Throughout the year, feasts and solemnities honor saints and mysteries of faith, from Christ the King to Corpus Christi to the Sacred Heart.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that sanctifying grace perfects the soul itself to enable it to live with God and act by His love. The liturgical year is designed for exactly this sanctification. It provides the rhythm by which grace works in our lives across seasons of celebration and penance, joy and sorrow, anticipation and fulfillment.

Here's what matters: the liturgical calendar doesn't coincide with the secular New Year or fiscal quarters. It begins with Advent and ends with Christ the King. Church time is kairos, God's time, not chronos, clock time. It's life shaped by the mysteries of Christ, not the demands of commerce.

Capitalism's Version of Time

The commercial calendar is simpler to understand because we live in it every day. It's a year defined by sales seasons and marketing events: Valentine's Day, Back to School, Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas shopping season. These dates are fixed and promoted by retailers. The cultural expectation is participation in consumption cycles.

The secular calendar frames our year around shopping goals, not sacred mysteries. Your identity becomes consumer rather than Christian. Your wallet matters more than your soul.

Theologians like John Kavanaugh describe consumerism as a commodity form of life, a worldview that shapes how we think, feel, love, pray, and value life. Consumerism doesn't just fill our days. It defines our identity. In this system, we are what we possess. Our worth is measured by what we can buy.

Pope Paul VI's encyclical Populorum Progressio emphasized what matters: it is what a man is, rather than what he has, that counts. But the commercial calendar inverts this truth. It teaches desire and spending instead of memory and gratitude. It builds communal activity around buying and consumption, often isolating spiritual practice.

Pope Saint John Paul II addressed the scourge of consumerism in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, reminding us that the world economic situation embodies the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. He warned that an abundance of goods makes people vulnerable to slavery to possessions, that consumerism is essentially an inability to see beyond material goods, and that it generates a restlessness manifesting in constant search for new products and a throwaway culture.

The Catholic Church teaches clearly: human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded in this system. Consumerism prevents man's growth as a human being and stands in opposition to his true grandeur. It makes difficult the recognition and respect of the hierarchy of true values. It jeopardizes our collective fulfillment.

Pope Francis warns that indifferent individualism leads to the cult of opulence reflected in the throwaway culture all around us. We have a surfeit of unnecessary things but no longer have the capacity to build authentic human relationships marked by truth and mutual respect.

From Feast Days to Shopping Days

Historically, feast days like Christmas grew from Church tradition and Scripture, not from calendars of commerce. The mystery of Christ's birth had every right to be prepared for by prayer and works of penance. But over time, secular culture appropriated Christian holidays.

Christmas, once a sacred feast, became the biggest commercial season in America. Studies show many Americans celebrate it more for culture and consumption than for Christ. The first commercial Christmas card was commissioned in England in 1843 by Sir Henry Cole. By the early twentieth century, department stores dominated retail and saw opportunity. They began advertising and decorating for Christmas the day after Thanksgiving, which at the time was always celebrated on the last Thursday in November.

No retailer wanted to be first to break tradition and roll out Christmas-themed goods before Thanksgiving. The importance of the post-Thanksgiving shopping season became apparent in 1939 during the Great Depression when November had five Thursdays, pushing Thanksgiving to November 30 and leaving less time for holiday sales.

The term Black Friday emerged in the 1950s and 1960s when Philadelphia police used it to describe overwhelming congestion caused by post-holiday shoppers. By the 1980s, retailers rebranded the term to mark when stores supposedly moved from financial losses to profitability, positioning it as the symbolic kickoff of the holiday retail season.

Today, Black Friday marks the unofficial start of Christmas shopping season with promotional sales drawing massive crowds. The news media gives heavy play to reports of Black Friday shopping and implications for commercial success of the Christmas season. Retailers have received pushback from consumers over opening on Thanksgiving Day itself, with opposition including perceived over-commercialization of Thanksgiving and retail workers not spending time with loved ones on the holiday.

Christmas decorations and promotions now creep earlier and earlier, often into the first weeks of November. Despite that, holiday shopping surges on Black Friday and the weeks between that day and Christmas remain when retailers make bulk of annual profits.

The secular calendar has transformed sacred mysteries into sales opportunities. Easter becomes candy hunts and seasonal promotions. Advent disappears under the avalanche of Christmas shopping pressure. Lent is forgotten entirely in favor of year-round consumption.

This shift happened gradually but decisively over the twentieth century. Christmas and other holy days became tied to gift commerce and sales culture, overshadowing spiritual preparation. Seasons emphasizing penitence, reflection, and conversion gave way to seasons emphasizing spending, acquiring, and consuming.

What Christians Lose

When commercial time controls your year, you lose spiritual depth. The liturgical year invites participation in the life of Christ. The Church unfolds the entire mystery of Christ and calls faithful to live into it, not just mark it. Catholics are meant to participate in Christ's birth, suffering, death, and resurrection through the liturgical seasons. This isn't intellectual assent. This is lived reality.

But when Christians skip seasons like Advent fasting for sales, they lose depth, anticipation, and interior conversion. Advent historically was a mini-Lent, a time of preparation including fasting and penance. Already by the fifth century, major feast days required periods of abstinence and penance to prepare for them. The logic was simple: major events take preparation, and we prepare our souls to receive grace at great feasts.

Until 1966, fasting during Advent was common in Catholic practice. Guidelines were clearly laid out. The 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia noted that Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and Canada fasted on Wednesdays of Advent. There was also Advent Embertide, corresponding to Ember Days tradition, consisting of three days set apart for fasting and prayer.

Canon Law's penitential days and times in the universal Church are every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent. Advent is not technically listed as a penitential season. But the Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year speak of Advent as having a twofold character: preparing for Christmas and the end of the world, marked as a period of devout and expectant delight. The purple vestments signal a penitential note even if mandatory fasting has been removed.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote that Advent is the season in which Christians must rekindle in their hearts the hope that they will be able with God's help to renew the world. Pope Francis added that Advent is a time for overturning our perspectives, letting ourselves be surprised by God's mercy. Penance, mercy, anticipation, and renewal are all part of the Advent journey.

But the commercial calendar teaches no such things. In the marketplace, feast days teach desire and spending. Retail rituals become quasi-religious, shaping identity more than sacraments. When Christians prioritize sales over liturgical seasons, they surrender their spiritual rhythm.

The liturgical calendar builds communal rhythm through Sunday obligations, feast days, holy days, grounded in shared faith. The commercial calendar builds communal activity around buying and consumption. One sanctifies time. The other monetizes it.

Sacred memory becomes consumer ritual. Gratitude becomes greed. Preparation becomes purchasing. The mysteries of Christ fade behind the mysteries of merchandise.

Why These Calendars Cannot Be Synced

The liturgical and commercial calendars serve different goals. One aims at sanctification, repentance, participation in the mystery of Christ. The other aims at accumulation, profit, distraction. They measure time by different values.

Consumerism measures time by discounts, deals, deadlines, and spending. The Church measures time by feasts, fasts, repentance, sacrifice, and sanctity. Commerce tends to reduce human worth to economic value. Christianity affirms divine image above market value.

Scripture is clear. In Luke's Gospel, Jesus warns: Take care and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions. In Matthew's Gospel, He commands: Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven. He declares: You cannot serve God and mammon.

The rich young ruler came to Jesus asking what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus told him to sell his possessions, give to the poor, and follow Him. The man went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. Jesus told His disciples: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.

Throughout Scripture, wealth and materialism are presented as spiritual dangers. Proverbs teaches: Better a little with the fear of the Lord than great wealth with turmoil. First Timothy warns: Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. Ecclesiastes observes: Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.

Pope St. John Paul II warned against consumerism's reduction of spiritual life to material acquisition in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. Writing at the end of the Cold War, celebrating the west's victory over communism, he cautioned about consumer attitudes and lifestyles that could be improper and damaging physically and spiritually. It is not wrong to want to live better, he wrote, but what is wrong is a style of life presumed to be better when directed towards having rather than being, which wants to have more not in order to be more but to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself.

The theological tension is fundamental. The Church teaches that what a man is matters more than what he has. Consumerism teaches the opposite. These worldviews cannot be reconciled.

Reclaiming the Liturgical Year

Practical resistance begins with observing Advent properly: fasting, prayer, watchfulness over the early Christmas rush. Enter Lent fully with abstinence, almsgiving, spiritual preparation. Celebrate holy days with devotion rather than distraction. Learn the saints' days and make feast days meaningful. Use liturgical colors and symbols to mark time intentionally.

Spiritual practices matter. Perforate daily life with sacramentals: the rosary, Stations of the Cross, Eucharistic presence during church seasons. Make Ordinary Time extraordinary through sustained growth in Christ rather than sustained sales fatigue. Fasting with humility and repentance enables one to draw closer to God by denying the body worldly pleasure. Though the fast influences the body, emphasis is placed on the spiritual facet rather than physical deprivation.

The Catechism teaches that penance helps us acquire mastery over our instincts and freedom of heart. Fasting breaks enslavement to material objects. Physical hunger anticipates and echoes spiritual hunger, to be satisfied by the true food of Christ's own Body and Blood. Fasting gives way to festivity and celebration, emptiness to fullness, hunger to true satiety.

Catholics with long memories remember that Advent once contained fast days. In some countries, Christmas Eve was a fast day, which is why the Polish Christmas Eve Vigilia supper is meatless. Eastern Orthodox still begin Christmas preparation through a pre-Christmas fast usually starting in November.

The commercialization of the Christmas season tempts us to celebrate throughout Advent. Simply withholding partying until the Christmas season would be great penance in itself. If we took preparation of Advent more seriously, it would radically transform our experience of Christmas and be a great opportunity for spiritual renewal. If we say no to our desires a little more and take extra time for prayer, we can recapture the original purpose of Advent: to take a step back and withdraw from our attachment to material things.

Cultural witness matters. Christians living the Church's year become counter-cultural witness to consumer society, showing that time belongs to Christ. This witness is deeper than protests or boycotts. It is conversion of heart and calendar. It is choosing to let Christ order your days instead of letting commerce dictate them.

The Catholic wisdom of the people is capable of fashioning vital synthesis, creatively combining the divine and human, Christ and Mary, spirit and body, communion and institution, person and community, faith and homeland, intelligence and emotion. This wisdom is a Christian humanism radically affirming dignity of every person as a child of God, establishing basic fraternity, teaching people to encounter nature and understand work, providing reasons for joy and humor even in hard life.

For the people, this wisdom is also a principle of discernment and evangelical instinct through which they spontaneously sense when Gospel is served in the Church and when it is emptied of content and stifled by other interests. Living the liturgical year cultivates this wisdom.

Claiming Christ's Time for Our Souls

The commercial calendar insists we live by consumption. The liturgical calendar invites us to live by Christ's life. Christians who surrender time to capitalism lose spiritual rhythm, purpose, and identity. But those who reclaim liturgical time reclaim their souls.

This is not a call to abandon the modern world. This is a call to order it properly. The Church has always existed in the world without being of it. Catholics can work jobs, participate in economies, buy necessary goods. But we must not let the calendar of commerce replace the calendar of Christ.

Think about what you've lost. When was the last time you truly kept Advent? Not just lit candles on a wreath, but actually fasted, prayed, prepared your soul for Christmas with intentionality and discipline? When was the last time you entered Lent as a season of genuine conversion instead of giving up chocolate as a dietary choice? When did you last celebrate feast days as sacred time rather than days off work?

The marketplace wants your time because time is life. To control your calendar is to control your existence. Every hour spent shopping is an hour not spent praying. Every season structured around consumption is a season not structured around sanctification. Every feast day transformed into sale day is a holy day stolen from God.

But here's the truth capitalism doesn't want you to know: you can choose differently. You can say no to Black Friday and yes to Advent fasting. You can skip the Christmas shopping rush and spend that time at Confession. You can celebrate Christ the King instead of Cyber Monday. You can order your year around the mysteries of Christ instead of the mysteries of merchandise.

This choice won't make you popular. This choice won't make you comfortable. This choice will make you Christian.

The liturgical year is an act of resistance to consumer captivity. It's a prayer over time, an indictment of commercial colonization, and an invitation back to sacred rhythm. It's your life measured by Christ's life instead of by quarterly earnings. It's your identity rooted in baptism instead of in buying power.

Time is sacred, not sold. Your years belong to Christ, not to capitalism. The question is whether you'll live like you believe it.

Advent is coming. Lent will follow. Easter will arrive. Pentecost will pour out. Ordinary Time will stretch long. Christ the King will close the year. These seasons are waiting for you, inviting you deeper into the life of God.

But you have to choose them. You have to reject the commercial calendar's claims on your soul. You have to remember that you were made for eternity, not for earnings. You were created for communion with God, not consumption of goods.

The liturgical year is your inheritance as a Catholic. The commercial year is the world's attempt to steal it. Which calendar will shape your life? Which master will order your time? Who really controls your days?

The answer to these questions will determine not just how you spend your year, but where you spend your eternity. Choose the calendar of Christ. Choose the rhythm of the Church. Choose time made sacred by the mysteries of salvation.

Choose life measured by grace instead of by greed. Choose Christ.

~by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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