Proper timing

Just look at the difference in timing that has developed in U.S. culture (and perhaps elsewhere) between the Christmas season and the advertising media xmas holiday season.

Christmas trees adorned the stores around Haloween. Lawns got decorated a month ago.

But here at the trusty Vatican, things wait as they should.

Here our liturgy is still Advent preparation, but outside the Church doors it's been Christmas already for weeks.

Sad and discount.

link

VATICAN CITY, DEC 20, 2006 (VIS) - This afternoon, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, president of the Governorate of Vatican City State, will preside at the official lighting ceremony of the Christmas tree which was erected in St. Peter's Square last Wednesday. The tree stands next to the nativity scene, which will be inaugurated in the next few days.

The nativity scene, which will be unveiled on the evening of December 24, has seventeen life-size statues. Of these, nine are the original figures donated by St. Vincent Pallotti for the nativity scene in the Roman church of Sant'Andrea della Valle in 1842. The other eight figures were added over the course of the years. The Italian province of Trento, and the local council of Tesero - a village at an altitude of 1,000 meters in the Valle di Fiemme in eastern Trento - have provided a further thirteen sculpted wooden figures and animals, as well as household utensils for the depiction of daily life.