The Christmas season then lasts 12 days, ending with Epiphany on Jan. 6.

But things aren’t that simple in modern America, the land of the free and the home of the malls. For millions of us, today’s Christmas begins when “Feliz Navidad” beer ads start interrupting National Football League broadcasts and Holiday movies surge into cable-TV schedules previously crowded with Halloween zombie marathons.

Or perhaps the season begins with those Christmas church bazaars around Thanksgiving. Then again, many begin saluting friends with “Merry Christmas!” about the time public institutions start holding Holiday parties and seasonal concerts — in the early days of December.

In other words, it’s getting harder and harder for Christians who try to practice their faith to answer what was once a simple question: When is Christmas?

“Unfortunately, most Americans — especially evangelical Protestants — have so distanced themselves from any awareness of the Christian calendar that their decisions about that kind of question have been handed over to the culture,” said the Rev. Russell D. Moore, dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

Many evangelicals fear the “cold formalism” that they associate with churches that follow the liturgical calendar and the end result, he said, is “no sense of what happens when in the Christian year, at all.” Thus, instead of celebrating ancient feasts such as Epiphany, Pentecost and the Transfiguration, far too many American church calendars are limited to Christmas and Easter, along with cultural festivities such as Mother’s Day, the Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl.

In Baptist life, the faithful once knew that Christmas was near when their church choirs pulled out all the stops, hired some outside musicians and performed a semi-classical “Christmas cantata” or a few selections from G.F. Handel’s “Messiah.” As recently as the 1960s, these cantatas were usually staged the Sunday before Christmas. These days, the Christmas concerts are creeping forward in December church bulletins, closer and closer to Thanksgiving. Ditto for all of those special children’s programs and official church Christmas parties.

“I’ve been watching to see when pastors schedule their Christmas sermon series and when music directors start inserting Christmas songs into their services,” said Moore. “The question these days is whether Christmas will even last until Christmas. …

“All of this is being driven by travel, family events and what’s happening all around us. Right now, our churches are running about two weeks behind the culture.”

If that’s the case, then church leaders who truly want to get in sync need to pay closer attention to our culture’s highest Christmas authority — the National Retail Federation. It’s press release projecting holiday sales numbers is “the official starter’s gun” that unleashes the madness, said Washington Post reporter Hank Stuever, author of “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present.” This year, that statement was released on Oct. 6 and the official verdict was “average,” or about $465.6 billion in sales.

“Once those numbers come out, that’s when you know — there’s no stopping it. Here comes Christmas, whether you’re ready or not,” he said.

Stuever said that from his outsider perspective, as a lapsed Catholic, it’s obvious that many clergy are “still paying a lot of lot of lip service” to Jesus being the “reason for the season and all that. I understand what they’re saying, but surely they can see all of the materialism that’s on display out in their parking lots and in their pews. … Once Christmas gets rolling, everyone just goes bonkers and it’s hard to claim otherwise.”

This year, he added, it will be especially interesting to see how many leaders in “all of those big-box churches” cancel their Sunday morning services instead of daring to clash with family Christmas tree rites in American homes.

Moore stressed that he will be in his Highview Baptist pulpit on Christmas morning and, here’s the key, his children know why.

“To even think that we have come to the point where we do not worship on the Lord’s Day because it is Christmas is, to me, absolutely absurd. Where’s the logic in that? What are people thinking?”

The Rev. Rick Lance knows all about that. He has long been one of the true believers who battle the waves of “Happy Holidays” messages that define one of their faith’s holiest seasons as the civic tsunami between Halloween and the inevitable wrapping-paper wreckage on Christmas morning.

The problem is that whining doesn’t work. Thus, Lance has grown tired of preaching his all-to-familiar annual sermon on why the faithful should “keep Christ in Christmas” while making fewer pilgrimages to their shopping malls.

If people actually want to celebrate Christmas differently, this countercultural revolt will require advance planning and real changes.

“To continue playing the game of ‘ain’t it awful what they have done to Christmas’ may be a cop-out,” argued Lance, the executive director of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions. “After all, we contribute to the commercialization of Christmas. We are a part of the supposed problem of abuse that the Christmas season has experienced. …

“A revitalization of Christmas will not come from Wall Street, Main Street, the malls or the halls of Congress and the state legislature. The chatter of talking heads on news programs will not make this a reality.”

It would help if their churches offered constructive advice. That’s why it was significant that, just before Dec. 25, the Southern Baptist Convention’s news service published several commentaries by Lance and others raising unusually practical questions about how members of America’s largest non-Catholic flock can fine-tune future Christmas plans.

For example, Christians for centuries have marked the pre-Christmas season of Advent with appeals to help the needy. It’s significant that Baptists — who tend to ignore the liturgical calendar — have long honored one of their most famous missionaries and humanitarians by collecting missions offerings during this timeframe. This Baptist missionary to China even has her own Dec. 22 feast day on Episcopal Church calendar.

Thus, Lance noted that, this year “my wife and I decided to make our largest gift ever to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions. … This may be a small step, but we believe it is a step in the right direction.”

One big problem is that America is a highly complex culture that observes at least three versions of Christmas, with the secular often bleeding into the sacred. They are:

* The Holidays: Formally begins on Black Friday after Thanksgiving. The season slows around Dec. 15, with few events close to Dec. 25. Shopping malls and lawyers define these Holidays.

* Christmas: This season begins in early December in most churches, with many concerts and festivities scheduled between Dec. 7 and Dec. 20, so as not to clash with travel plans by church members. There is at least one Christmas Day service.

* The 12 days of Christmas: This celebration begins with the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on Dec. 25 and continues through Epiphany, Jan. 6. This ancient tradition is all but extinct.

So what are believers supposed to do next time to restore faith to the Christmas season?

The Rev. Todd Brady of First Baptist Church in Paducah, Ky., urged parents to think twice before — literally — adding Santa to their outdoor Nativity scenes.

“Children in today’s world already have a difficult time distinguishing between fantasy and reality,” he said. “Christmastime often blurs even further the line between what is real and what is not real.”

Church historian Nathan Finn also asked parents to weigh the implications of discussing that magical list that determines “who’s naughty and nice.” Children quickly realize this is an empty threat.

“Far more troublesome is the sub-gospel message this tradition sends. Santa is cast as the judge of all children,” he noted. The problem is that the real Christian Gospel insists that, “every kid deserves the coal. Every parent deserves the coal. I deserve the coal. … There is nothing we can do to change our circumstances and move ourselves from the naughty list to the nice list.”

The bottom line: The true meaning of Christmas isn’t that Santa Claus is the highest authority on sin and grace.

“We are moved from the naughty list to the nice list,” stressed Finn, “not because of something we do, but because of what Jesus had done for us.”

The wave started with a flash-mob performance by the Opera Company of Philadelphia and hundreds of local choristers. Dressed as shoppers, they sang the best-known anthem from George F. Handel’s “Messiah” oratorio at noon in the downtown Philadelphia Macy’s, which was already decked out for the holidays on Oct. 30th.

Then came the Nov. 13th performance that sent this viral-video trend into overdrive, when 100 vocalists — led by a young woman singing the opening hallelujahs into her cellphone — shocked a food-court crowd in a Welland, Ontario, shopping mall.

There are online reports and rumors about similar “Hallelujah Chorus” sneak attacks in the marketplace. The key is that many onlookers know this classic by heart and can sing along without missing many beats.

These are strange scenes, but they would not surprise anyone who has studied the history of Handel’s masterwork and its stunning popularity, especially among American believers, said Calvin R. Stapert, a retired music professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. He is the author of the new book, “Handel’s Messiah: Comfort for God’s People.”

The Macy’s performance was spectacular and the food-court performance was just as fascinating in its own way, he said.

“One part of me says, ‘Wonderful!’ It’s thrilling. … Then I look at the comments that people keep writing” at YouTube.com as they respond to the videos, said Stapert. “Some of them are so deeply moved that this anthem to their Savior is being sung in such a secular environment. Then there are others who make it clear that, for them, this is nothing more than … a novel way of saluting a cornerstone of Western musical culture.”

No one knows why “Messiah” has become so popular, noted Stapert, in his book. The work’s omnipresence — with performances in churches, civic centers and elite concert halls — is probably the result of “musical, textual, social, religious and psychological factors that will never be completely unraveled.” There is no precedent in music history for this phenomenon.

For starters, Handel is an unlikely hero for today’s musical masses. He was a “reluctant eighteenth-century German Lutheran composer who would have preferred to continue writing Italian operas in Protestant England, a country that had no oratorio tradition until he ‘invented’ it. The rest, as they say, is history,” wrote Stapert.

This musical form — the oratorio — was also a unique and at times controversial kind of art. Handel composed “Messiah” and many of his greatest works in a cultural no man’s land between the music common in sacred sanctuaries and the lively, entertaining, operatic works that were popular in theaters and concert halls. Nevertheless, most oratorios were based on the lives of biblical heroes and early Christian saints.

Then there was “Messiah: A Sacred Oratorio,” which was composed in 24 days and performed for the first time in Dublin in 1742 and a year later in London. The libretto covered the drama of the full Christian liturgical year, yet the work was never intended for church performances. Handel originally composed the work for approximately 24 skilled singers and 24 instrumentalists.

Today, “Messiah” is often performed with choruses consisting of 100 singers or more and orchestras of every imaginable size and composition. In many performances, amateur performers are forced to cut the tempos of Handel’s mercurial, dancing choruses until they resemble lumbering musical stampedes.

To state the matter bluntly, noted Stapert, no complex work of classical music “has survived, let alone thrived, on so many performances, good, bad, and indifferent, by and for so many people year after year for such a long time.”

Now, the most famous anthem from this Christian masterpiece has reached the true public square of our age, in the same mix as “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

“You have to ask,” noted Stapert, “if many people are really listening to the words. After all, who is this ‘King of Kinds and Lord of Lords’? … You have to think that the cultural police would be out in a matter of minutes to shut this down if people were paying attention to this profoundly Christian work that is being sung right out in the open, in a mall. Has the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ become so familiar that people cannot hear what it’s saying?”

Still, it didn’t take long for outraged parents to leak one crucial statement — that Father Christmas, also known as Santa Claus, isn’t real — to the Italian press. Headline writers around the world immediately felt a great disturbance in the Holiday Force, as if millions of tiny nonsectarian voices had cried out in terror.

Clearly, this priest had committed blasphemy.

Now, the Catholic shepherd of Salt Lake City has bravely ventured into similar territory. Bishop John C. Wester has asked those in his flock to observe the Advent season during the four weeks before Christmas and then — readers may need to sit down — to celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25th and during the season that follows.

“Few would disagree that we live in a busy and rushed society. … You may have noticed that in our hurried society many stores have already decorated for Christmas, radio stations are sneaking in a Christmas song here and there and even some of our own parishes have begun preparing for Christmas parties for early December,” noted Wester, in a pastoral letter (.pdf) released on Nov. 24.

“What is the rush? … Advent is a season of preparation, although it has come to be neglected in many places. Too often, the season of Advent is overshadowed by the ‘holiday season’ as we move too quickly into celebrating Christmas. By the time that the actual solemnity of Christmas arrives, many of us are burned out.”

To be perfectly blunt about it, he added, the secular season called “The Holidays” has been hyped to the point that, in the end, “Christmas has become anticlimactic.”

The bishop’s letter has generated a surprising amount of buzz in a short time, said Deacon Greg Kandra, a veteran journalist who directs the online news programming (NetNY.net) for the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. In effect, Wester has issued a call for countercultural revolt against the principalities and powers that shape the American calendar, he said.

For starters, the bishop is trying “to remind people — through the pulpit and through education — that just because they are hearing Christmas music doesn’t mean that it’s really Christmas,” said Kandra, a 26-year CBS News veteran who has won two Emmys and two Peabody Awards.

“As everyone knows, most of this is rooted in commercialism. But just because we have Black Friday and people are stampeding through the malls doesn’t mean that is what Christmas is really about.”

After throwing down his gauntlet, Wester offered practical examples of what he would like to see in the parishes and schools of his diocese.

Rather than leap straight to Christmas trees early in December, the bishop urged Catholic families to embrace Advent prayer wreathes — with candles marking the Sundays leading up to Christmas. Families could have “Jesse Trees” that are decorated in Advent purple and symbols of the ancestors of Jesus, before adding Christmas decorations at the proper time.

Rather than hold premature Christmas parties, the bishop suggested that Catholic schools plan “Gaudete” parties — Latin for “rejoice” — that are linked to the third Sunday in Advent. Facilities could be decorated with simple wreaths and greenery, with the full Christmas decorations in place as students return after New Year’s Day. Full Christmas decor should remain in place in churches, schools and homes through the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord on the 9th of January.

By all means, said Wester, Catholics should hold parties throughout this entire Christmas season, which begins — following centuries of tradition — with Christmas Day.

The goal is for Advent to be a period of “waiting in joyful hope,” a time of preparation, reflection and prayer. At least, that’s what the church’s calendar says.

“It is so easy to … decorate our churches and houses for Christmas, to spend more time shopping than in prayer and to host Christmas parties before the season has arrived,” said Wester. “I know it is an enormous challenge to remain faithful to the Advent season when we are surrounded by a society which, while claiming to be Christian, does not take the time to reflect and prepare as the church calls us to do.”

However, he added, “As Catholics, we must celebrate Advent differently.”

The cast of “It’s a Wonderful Life 2” reassembled on stage at Celebration Covenant Church, a suburban megachurch north of Dallas. There were characters from a Victorian tableau, along with Frosty the Snowman, young ballerinas and children dressed as penguins. Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus were there, too.

Then, entering from stage right, came “an adult Christ stripped down to his loincloth and smeared with Dracula blood, dragging a cross to center stage while being whipped by two centurion guards,” writes Stuever, in “Tinsel,” his open-a-vein study of Christmas in the American marketplace. “Here is where the Nativity, Dickens and Burl Ives collide head-on with Good Friday, as Jesus is crucified while everyone sings ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing,’ ending on a long, noisy note: ‘newborn kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.’

“Then they freeze.

“Hold it for applause.”

The scene was achingly sincere and painfully bizarre, with holy images jammed into a pop framework next to crass materialism. For millions of Americans, this is the real Christmas.

“I wrote it in my notes, right there in that church,” said Stuever. “I wrote, ‘It’s Picasso.’ … I just couldn’t believe it.”

There is nothing new about a journalist “embedding” himself to experience life on the front lines. Rather than heading to Iraq, Stuever moved to the Bible Belt. He lived in Frisco, Texas, for six months in 2006, then made 12 short follow-up trips during the next two years.

The veteran Washington Post reporter convinced three families to let him see Christmas through their eyes, from the Back Friday craziness to the somber trashing of mountains of ripped wrapping paper. The book’s credo is voiced by Tammie Parnell, a 40-something business dynamo who decorates McMansions for women who are too busy to prepare for a Texas-sized Christmas.

“Fake is okay here,” she tells Stuever. “Diamond earrings. Christmas trees. If you want me to prove that fake is okay here, let’s you and I go to the Stonebriar Country Club pool one day and check everyone out.”

The bottom line? Most Americans say they want Bethlehem and the North Pole, but the truth is that they invest more time, energy and money at the North Pole. That’s fine with Stuever, who is openly gay and calls himself a “Christmas loser” — while wrestling with the lessons of his Jesuit education and the loss of his Catholic faith.

“A dip into even the most reverent inquiries by Bible scholars,” he argues, “easily leads to the conclusion that there was no actual manger scene in Bethlehem, no shepherds dropping by to see the baby, no star in the east, no Magi, no frankincense, no myrrh. … Many scholars have concluded, some more gently than others, that the Christmas story is intentionally fictive, written by the earliest, first-century evangelists to beef up Jesus’ street cred as a believable Jewish Messiah. Like any superhero, Christ needed an origin story rife with the drama, metaphors and the meaningful symbols of the era.”

Thus, “Tinsel” seeks the meaning of Christmas in the material world itself, in the blitz of shopping, in houses draped in high-voltage lights, in the complex joys and tensions of family life. Stuever argues that the binges of shopping and feasting are as ancient — and more significant today — than the rites of praying and believing.

For Stuever, Christmas is fake, but that’s fine because fake is all there is. He argues that millions of Americans struggle to find the “total moments” of nostalgia and joy that they seek at Christmas because they are not being honest about why they do what they do during the all-consuming dash to Dec. 25.

“It’s so easy to see all of the craziness on TV and say, ‘Oh, those poor, stupid people,’ ” he said. “But when you get down there in the middle of it with them and listen to what people are saying and try to feel what they are feeling, you realize that all of that wildness is not just about buying the new Wii at Best Buy. …

“It’s a religious experience for them, even though it couldn’t be more secular. They’re out there searching for transcendence, trying to find what they think is the magic of Christmas.”

And all the people said: “Advent? Don’t Catholics do that?”

This prickly response wasn’t all that unusual, in light of the history of Christmas in America, said Jones, who now teaches leadership and church ministry at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

“In the dominant American, Protestant traditions of this country, we’ve never had a Christian calendar that told us anything about Advent and the 12 days of Christmas,” explained Jones, author of “Church History Made Easy.”

“We went from the Puritans, and they hardly celebrated Christmas at all, to this privatized, individualized approach to the season that you see all around us. … If you mention the church calendar many people think you’ve gone Papist or something. They really don’t care what Christians did through the centuries.”

The history of Christmas has always been complicated, he noted, with religious rites colliding with traditions defined by family, community and commerce. However, the basic structure of the Advent and Christmas seasons has — until recently, historically speaking — remained the same.

In a short essay for laypeople, Jones noted that “Advent … comes to us from a Latin term that means ‘toward the coming.’ The purpose of this season was to look toward the coming of Christ to earth; it was a season that focused on waiting. As early as the 4th century A.D., Christians fasted during this season. … By the late Middle Ages, Advent preceded Christmas by 40 days in the Eastern Orthodox Church and by four weeks in western congregations.” Advent was then followed by the 12-day Christmas season.

For centuries, these seasons were shaped by traditions in extended families and small communities, patterns of rural and village life that endured from generation to generation, century after century, until the upheavals of the industrial revolution. During the 18th and 19th centuries, millions of people in Europe and then America pulled up their roots and moved into major cities.

Christmas evolved into a “gigantic party that ended up in the streets” to celebrate that legions of urban laborers were given a day off from work, noted Jones. It was a day for revelry, drinking, carousing and feasting, a holiday best observed in taverns and public houses instead of churches.

This was not a lovely Christmas tableau complete with candle-lit processions, prayers and carols. Something needed to be done.

Thus, Christmas began to change again. The goal was to create a kinder, gentler season, one centered in individual family homes. What emerged, with a big assist from advertising and other forms of mass media, was a “radically new and almost completely secular Christmas myth,” explained Jones. This was Christmas as pictured in the famous poem “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” popular songs, advertisements and scores of Thomas Nast cartoons.

Santa Claus replaced St. Nicholas and Advent vanished altogether, which was fine with most Americans because they never knew the season existed in the first place.

“What you had then was a holiday that was very appealing and positive, from an American, Protestant perspective,” said Jones. “It was very individualistic and centered on events in the family home, with all of that decorating, cooking, gift-giving and people traveling to be home for Christmas.

“This left you one step away from the full-blown commercialization of Christmas that took over in the 20th Century.”

Jones stressed that he isn’t naive enough to think that churches can turn this around by printing some Advent brochures to help families add another wrinkle to an already complex season. Still, it wouldn’t hurt for pastors and parents to stop and think about ways to let Advent be Advent and then to let Christmas be Christmas.

“Americans don’t like to wait,” he said. “We want what we want and we want it now. … That’s the way that we do Christmas. We mix and we match, taking a little bit of this and a whole lot of that. We rush around trying to create the Christmas we think is going to work for us.

“But Advent asks us to slow down and wait — to wait for Christmas. Most people don’t think that approach will work very well at all.”

No, honest, as in “the 12 days of” you know what between Dec. 25 and Jan. 5.

If you doubt the accuracy of this statement, you can head over to the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. There you will find an interactive calendar that bravely documents the fact that, according to centuries of Christian tradition, the quiet season called Advent has just ended and the 12-day Christmas season has just begun.

So cease stripping the decorations off your tree and postpone its premature trip to the curb. There is still time to prepare for a Twelfth Night party and then the grand finale on Jan. 6, when the feast of the Epiphany marks the arrival in Bethlehem of the magi.

“You would be amazed how hard it was to find information on the World Wide Web about all of this,” lamented Joe Larson, the USCCB’s director of digital media. “We wanted to link to sites that would help tell Catholics what we believe about these seasons and why we do what we do — or what we are supposed to do — during Advent and Christmas. …

“What we ended up with is definitely not a finished product, but we’ll expand it in the future. We got the ball rolling this year.”

The materials gathered at www.usccb.org/advent do not, at first glance, appear to be all that rebellious.

The website contains pull-down menus providing scriptures, prayers, meditations and biographies of the saints whose feasts are celebrated during these seasons. Note that the feast of St. Nicholas of Myra — yes, that St. Nicholas — was back on Dec. 6. Another page suggests family movies for the seasons, some obvious (think “The Nativity Story”) and some not so obvious (think “Ernest Saves Christmas”).

The Christmas season has always been complicated. Many early Christians celebrated the birthday of Jesus on May 20, while others used dates in April and March. Most early believers, however, emphasized the Jan. 6 feast of the Epiphany.

Then, sometime before 354, Christians in Rome began celebrating the Feast of the Nativity on Dec. 25, which created tension with the Eastern churches that were using different dates. Then, in 567, the Second Council of Tours established Dec. 25 as the nativity date, Jan. 6 as Epiphany and the 12 days in between as the Christmas season — the liturgical calendar’s biggest party.

The problem, of course, is that Advent now clashes with the 30-something or 40-something days of the secular season — called “The Holidays” — that begins with the shopping mall rituals of Thanksgiving weekend. For most Americans, Christmas Day is the end of “The Holidays,” even though it is the beginning of the real Christmas season.

While many Christians still observe Advent — especially Anglicans, Lutherans and other mainline Protestants — some older Roman Catholics may remember when the guidelines for the season were stricter. In Eastern Orthodoxy, the season is still observed by many as “Nativity Lent.”

“In a pre-Vatican II context, Advent looked a lot like Lent,” noted Father Rick Hilgartner, associate director of the USCCB’s Secretariat of Divine Worship. “It was the season you used to prepare for Christmas, the way Lent helps you prepare for Easter.”

Today, it’s even hard for priests to follow the rhythms of the church’s prayers, hymns and rites, he said. Hilgartner said he tries to stay away from Christmas tree lots and shopping malls until at least halfway through Advent. He accepts invitations to some Christmas parties, even though they are held in Advent.

Now that it’s finally Christmas, he feels a pang of frustration when he turns on a radio or television and finds that — after being bombarded with “holiday” stuff for weeks — the true season is missing in action.

“It would be different, of course, if we all lived in a monastic community and the liturgical calendar totally dominated our lives,” said Hilgartner. “Then we could get away with celebrating the true seasons and we wouldn’t even whisper the word ‘Christmas’ until the start of the Christmas Mass. But the church doesn’t exist in a vacuum and we can’t live in a cultural bubble. …

“But it’s good to try to be reasonable. It’s good to slow down and it’s good to celebrate Christmas, at least a little, during Christmas. It’s good to try.”

And, lo, the former Southern Baptist pastor told the voters: “Are you about worn out by all the television commercials you’ve been seeing, mostly about politics? I don’t blame you. At this time of year, sometimes it’s nice to pull aside from all of that and just remember that what really matters is a celebration of the birth of Christ and being with our family and our friends. I hope that you and your family will have a magnificent Christmas season. And on behalf of all of us, God bless and merry Christmas.”

This caused a firestorm among the political elites that symbolized the year’s biggest trend in religion news — the revenge of the infamous “values voters” who, apparently, remain alive and well in church pews across the heartland.

But will the Republican Party win this “pew gap” contest again? That was the question that dominated the Religion Newswriters Association poll to determine the top 10 religion news stories in 2007. There were plenty of new signs that the so-called religious right exists, but that it isn’t a monolith after all.

Here’s how America’s religion-beat specialists described the year’s top story: “Evangelical voters ponder whether they will be able to support the eventual Republican candidate, as they did in 2004, because of questions about the leaders’ faith and-or platform. Many say they would be reluctant to vote for Mormon Mitt Romney.”

Then, in the number-two slot, was the flip side of that political coin: “Leading Democratic presidential candidates make conscious efforts to woo faith-based voters after admitting failure to do so in 2004.”

The rise of Huckabee was the strongest sign that the “values voters” are still out there, but that they are not meshing well with the Republican Party establishment. The latest Southern Baptist from Hope, Ark., has been preaching a blend of conservative morality and populist economics that made him sound like an old-fashioned Bible Belt Democrat from the days before Roe v. Wade.

“The Huckabee surge represents a break with what has been standard operating procedure within the GOP for more than a generation,” argued columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, an outspoken Catholic who remains a Democrat. “The former Arkansas governor has exposed a fault line within the Republican coalition. The old religious right is dying because it subordinated the views of its followers to short-term political calculations. The white evangelical electorate is tired of taking orders from politicians who care more about protecting the wealthy than ending abortion, more about deregulation than family values.”

Here is the rest of the RNA top 10 list:

(3) The Anglican wars continued, as an Episcopal Church promise to exercise restraint on homosexual issues failed to bring peace in the global Anglican Communion. Doctrinal debates about marriage and sex continued to cause tensions in other flocks as well, both Christian and Jewish.

(4) Debates about global warming increased in importance, with many oldline Protestant leaders giving the topic a high priority. Meanwhile, some evangelical leaders argued about its importance in comparison with other social and moral issues.

(5) Religious leaders on both sides of the aisle questioned what to do about illegal immigration, with some clergy daring to shelter undocumented immigrants.

(6) Thousands of Buddhist monks led a pro-democracy movement in Myanmar, which was then crushed by the government.

(7) Conservative Episcopalians kept leaving the U.S. church in order to align with traditionalist Anglican bishops in Africa and elsewhere in the global South, initiating yet another round of legal disputes about church endowment funds and property.

(8) In another round of 5-4 votes, the U.S. Supreme Court took conservative stands on three cases with religious implications: upholding a ban on partial-birth abortions, allowing public schools to establish some limits on free speech and rejecting a challenge to the government’s Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

(9) Transitions continued at the top of major Evangelical Protestant institutions, as symbolized by the deaths of Jerry Falwell, Rex Humbard, Ruth Bell Graham, D. James Kennedy and Tammy Faye Messner, the ex-wife of Jim Bakker.

(10) Roman Catholic leaders in the United States wrestled with the high cost of settling legal cases linked to decades of clergy sexual abuse of children and teen-agers. The price tag reached $2.1 billion, with a record $660 million settlement in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

In the year of our Lord 1939, the National Retail Dry Goods Association asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving to the next-to-last Thursday in November. This was strategic, since President Abraham Lincoln had proclaimed the last Thursday of the month as the official holiday. This meant that Thanksgiving was occasionally delayed until a fifth Thursday — a cruel blow to merchants.

Confusion reigned until Congress reached a compromise and, since 1942, Thanksgiving has been observed on the fourth Thursday in November.

And thus was born America’s most powerful and all-consuming season. This later evolved into the shopping festival called “The Holidays,” which in the past generation has started creeping into stores days or weeks before Turkey Day.

“None of this, of course, has anything to do with the Christmas traditions that Christians have been observing through the ages,” said Teresa Berger, professor of liturgical studies at Yale Divinity School.

To be candid, she said, it does “help to remember that celebrations of Christmas and other holy seasons have always been affected by what happens in the marketplace and the surrounding culture. … But that isn’t what we are seeing, today. The question now is whether or not the shopping mall will define what is Christmas for most Christians.”

Here’s the bottom line. For centuries, Christmas was a 12-day season that began on Dec. 25th and ended on Jan. 6th with the celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany. Thus, the season of Christmas followed Christmas Day, with most people preparing for the holy day in a festive blitz during the final days or even hours, with many stores staying open until midnight on Christmas Eve.

Today, everything has been flipped around, with the Christmas or Holiday season preceding Dec. 25.

For most Americans, this season begins with an explosion of shopping on Black Friday after Thanksgiving, followed by a flurry of office parties and school events packed into early December. The goal is to hold as many of these events as possible long before the onset of the complicated travel schedules that shape the lives of many individuals and families.

Meanwhile, television networks, radio stations and newspapers have created their own versions of the “12 days of Christmas,” inserting them before — often long before — Dec. 25 as a secular framework for advertising campaigns, civic charity projects, holiday music marathons, parades, house-decorating competitions and waves of mushy movies, old and new.

Needless to say, this is not the Christmas that Berger knew as she grew up in Germany in the post-World War II era. As a Catholic, the days between Christmas and Epiphany were marked by a series of events — such as the feasts of St. Stephen and St. John the Evangelist — that were accompanied by their own rites and customs. Lutherans and other Christians had their own traditions for marking this time.

“When people talk about a season called the ‘Twelve Days of Christmas,’ they are primarily talking about something that was much more common in England,” said Berger. “There are many reasons for that, not the least of which was the popularity of the song by that name.”

While these traditions took various forms, the key was that the religious elements of the season remained intact. Christians celebrated Christmas during Christmas.

Berger said that it still makes her a bit uncomfortable when she sees families putting up and decorating their Christmas trees before they are even finished using the candles and green wreathes associated with the penitential season of Advent, which begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. There are many more people, of course, who do not observe Advent, which is called Nativity Lent in Orthodox churches.

“Today, people believe they can have whatever they want, when they want it, and Christmas becomes whatever the culture says that it is,” she said. “We can, however, revolt against this. We can choose, for example, not to send out 1,000 mindless Christmas cards. We can sit down and write our own cards and even breathe a prayer for the people we love while we do that.

“No one can force us to live according to the laws of the new Christmas. We can make our own choices.”

The purpose of Hanukkah menorahs is to publicize the miracle at the heart of the “Festival of Lights,” when tradition says a one-day supply of pure oil burned for eight days after Jewish rebels liberated the temple from their Greek oppressors. Thus, most families place their menorahs in front windows facing a street.

So far, so good.

The lighting of the first candle should be at sundown on the first night of the eight-day season, which begins on Friday (Dec. 15) this year. Hanukkah candles should burn at least 30 minutes and it’s forbidden to use their light for any purpose other than viewing or meditating.

Blessings are recited before the first candle is lit, starting with: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us by His commandments, and has commanded us to kindle the lights of Hanukkah.” Each night, another candle is added — with eight burning at the end of the season.

That’s it. That’s what Jews are supposed to do during Hanukkah. They’re supposed to light the candles and give thanks to God.

It’s all about lights shining in darkness.

“This is a simple holiday with a simple message and it isn’t supposed to be all that complicated,” said Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, the largest umbrella group for Orthodox Jews in North America.

“You come home from work, you light the candles, you say the blessings and then you sit down with your kids and play games with dreidels. … It’s pretty small stuff compared with all of the emotions of Passover.”

Some Jewish families will sing Hanukkah songs and fry some potato pancakes called “latkes,” homemade donuts or other festive foods using hot oil — a key symbol in the season. Many parents give their children small gifts each night, such as coins or chocolates wrapped in gold foil to resemble coins.

This is where, for many, the Hanukkah bandwagon starts to get out of control. As the Jewish Outreach Institute Hanukkah website bluntly states: “Hanukkah is the most widely celebrated American Jewish holiday, possibly because it is a fun, child-centered occasion.”

Everyone knows why Hanukkah keeps getting bigger and bigger, said Weinreb, who also has worked as a psychologist specializing in family issues.

“How can a Jewish kid growing up in America or anywhere else in the Western world not get swept up, to one degree or another, in the whole business of Christmas? The music is everywhere and the decorations are everywhere. Many of your school friends are having parties and they’re all excited about the gifts they’re going to get,” he said.

“From a Jewish perspective, all of this is a rabbi’s worst nightmare. You want to find a way to say, ‘That’s not us.’ But, in the end, many people lose control.”

Before you know it, someone else’s Christmas tree turns into a holiday tree and, finally, into something called a Hanukkah bush.

The end result is ironic, to say the least. Hanukkah is supposed to be a humble holiday about the need for Jews to resist compromising their beliefs in order to assimilate into a dominant culture. However, for many families it has become the biggest event on the Jewish calendar — because it is so close to the all-powerful cultural earthquake that some people still call “Christmas.”

Those old-fashioned notions about giving children a few modest Hanukkah gifts have evolved into expectations of a nightly procession of toys, clothing and electronic goodies. And, in many of America’s 2.5 million households with one Jewish parent and one Christian parent, the rites of the shopping mall have been blended to create the pop-culture reality called “Chrismukkah.”

All of this is easy to understand and hard to resist.

“One gift a night for eight nights is just commercialism, pure and simple. That has more to do with Toys ‘R’ Us than it does with Judaism,” said Weinreb. “Hanukkah is not the Jewish Christmas and we all know that. Hanukkah is what it is. We just need to do what we are supposed to do and let the holiday take care of itself.”