This week, we present you with our annual Christmas Gift Guide — and we present it to you in November. If this seems oddly early to you, it has always seemed oddly early to me, as well. After all:

n The Christmas season is six weeks away, still. Not only do we have Advent first, but at this juncture we also have the last two weeks of ordinary time, also.

n Christmas has clearly been overly commercialized in our society. Instead of the celebration of the Man of the Beatitudes it becomes, for many, all about material things.

When I first became publisher of the Register nearly 10 years ago, I expressed my surprise that the gift guide comes so early. The advertising crew politely explained to me that the Register has a more expansive purpose than I thought. We are a newspaper. We report on the crucial issues of our day. We are not a catalogue. But we are the national “Catholic conduit” into readers’ homes.

The other publications they get not only do not address Catholic issues — they don’t give Catholic businesses places to tell readers about their Catholic products.

Now, I have learned to moderate my view of the earliness of the Catholic gift guide. After all:

n Christmas is only six weeks away. If you want to buy gifts with an element of faith to them, you’ll need to order them now.

n And what better remedy for the commercialization of Christmas than the spiritualization of Christmas gifts?

So, I hope the Christmas gift guide is useful to you. Use it to get the matter of shopping out of the way so you can focus on what is really important about Advent and Christmas: Christ.