Between Christmas and Easter — this time of year is for many the most depressing, a time when the darkness and cold of winter seep within the bones, and drag the soul earthward.

Such might seem to be the proper reaction to the natural rhythms of the seasons. Winter is the time of barrenness and death, when life itself retreats beneath the surface and leaves only the white and gray of old age. The holidays only serve to make the winter gloom even more dense and penetrating. After the frantic sparkling of Christmas is gone and the tinsel is put away, there is only the long, grim wait until spring.

Perhaps our dreariness is largely self-inflicted. Perhaps it doesn't have to be this way. To understand why not, we need to look both backwards to Christmas and forwards to Easter.

Christmas, the Christmas which took so much of our time in decorating, shopping, wrapping, visiting, and feasting, which dominated our attention for so long but disappeared so quickly after weeks, even months of preparation, and was devoured in a matter of minutes— where is it now? Why does it not sustain us?

Maybe if we find out what went wrong with Christmas, we shall understand why the time after Christmas is so dull and leaden. Maybe if we find out what went wrong with Christmas, we can better prepare ourselves for Lent and Easter.

I believe the problem with Christmas is both simple and severe. We try to have Christmas without Advent, and hope to turn a holy day into a mere holiday.

But Christmas was never meant to be a mere holiday. A holiday is a slurred and secularized form of holy day, not just etymologically but culturally. A holy day feeds and strengthens the soul. A holiday, at best, merely feeds the bodily senses.

The holy day of Christmas was meant to prepare the soul, faced with what appears to be unremitting darkness, to long for the Light. The core of our error about Christmas, then, is that we cannot skim the true joy of Christmas off the surface, and leave behind the deep drink from which the bubbles of joy actually arise.

The joy of Christmas is of an afflicted people who have finally been delivered, who have endured the darkness and been suddenly, unexpectedly flooded with light. The darkness that now tends to afflict us after Christmas should actually be our companion before Christmas. It is the dark and cold into which the Christ was born. When we try to skim off the joy and skip the darkness, the darkness will come back tenfold to haunt us once the lifeless bubbles of the holiday die down.

The phone rang on the day before Christmas eve while we were visiting family. A friend of my mother-in-law, diagnosed with cancer, was slipping away fast. Probably wouldn't make it until Christmas. How could such a thing happen, especially during the Christmas holiday?

But that is what Christmas is about. The darkness is real. The cold is real. Death is real. Christmas is not exempt from darkness, cold and death. Christmas is the answer to these afflictions, but an answer only heard in a heart prepared by Advent, by a holy season, not a holiday season.

The proper spirit of preparation, then, is not giddy jolliness and gibbering busyness. The soul longing for God must have peace. Peace is the home of contemplation. Contemplation is the hearth of prayer. In the glowing embers of prayer, the Christmas Light is born.

If only hope had been born in our hearts this last Christmas, the Light that shatters all darkness, the child destined to destroy death, would be with us now, when the dark and cold of the season threaten to envelop us in despair.

What about Easter? Sadly, Easter as a holiday is an even greater and more insidious mockery of Easter as a holy day. As a culture of death, we do not feel the natural pagan stirrings of spring in the desire for new life. Fertility, for our society, is an affliction to be cured.

On a deeper level — the true level of Easter— we have lost the great joy of the resurrection; and the problem, again, is that we have tried to clasp the bubbles of Easter joy without the proper preparation, without Lent's deep, dark drink of denial and death. We do not spend the 40 days dying to our petty wants and disentangling ourselves from our persistent sins. We do not look, with unblinking eye, at the true state of our souls. We do not face the crucifixion on Good Friday. Such is the preparation of Lent. No wonder our Easter can fit in a basket of candy.

As with Christmas, so with Easter. The better our Advent, the more blessed and joyful our Christmas; the better our Lent, the more blessed and joyful our Easter.

There is a natural beauty to this time of year, between Christmas and Easter. It is best appreciated by those who realize that the natural rhythm of the seasons is a reflection of a much deeper supernatural rhythm. Like the seasons, we move from the birth of spring all the way round to the death of winter. If we try to sustain ourselves by a mere cycle of holidays, we shall face our own deaths with nothing stronger than Santa Claus in an Easter basket.

So let us make the most of this Lent, and plan right now, to have a most blessed Advent next year.

May all your holidays become holy days.

Benjamin Wiker writes from Hopedale, Ohio.