By Jake Doberenz

Every year, as the weather turns crisper, festive lights are strung up high, and Christmas inches closer, a unique phenomenon occurs in the world: the “defrosting” of Mariah Carey. Mariah Carey, popular for her earworm “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” represents the epitome of seasonally popular singers. She is so much associated with Christmas that she’s become a meme—images of her encased in ice have surfaced, with captions saying that she’s “defrosting” so she can enter the musical landscape once again for the Christmas season.

Even my fifth graders have heard of the meme. When I dared to play Christmas music before Thanksgiving, one kid cried out, “Mariah Carey hasn’t even unthawed yet!” as his argument that it wasn’t yet, in fact, an appropriate time to play Christmas music.

For me, I ignore many musical artists until it’s Christmas time. Pentatonix, Michael Bublé, and Bing Crosby are all artists found only in my Christmas playlist. They do sing more than Christmas songs (I assume), but each year, I hardly acknowledge their existence outside of December.

The seasonally dependent rise in some artists’ popularity represents more than just an exploration of how you can build an entire brand of music around one holiday. The fact that we have popular music associated with a time of year also reveals that we as humans instinctively understand the repeated rhythms of life.

Why else would people be VERY opinionated about when to play Christmas music unless they experience life in seasons? Can we start celebrating Christmas on November 1st? After Thanksgiving? December 1st? What’s the answer? Meanwhile, while we squabble about when to queue up Mariah Carey, many major retailers jump the gun, decking their halls as early as September, further blurring the lines of the “appropriate” Christmas season.

In contrast to this commercial rush, Christianity offers a structured approach to seasonal observance through its liturgical calendar, with Advent being particularly noteworthy. Advent, the period leading up to Christmas, is not just a countdown; it’s a time of spiritual preparation and reflection. This season, marked by practices such as lighting Advent candles and reading specific scriptures, is designed to focus the mind and heart on the anticipation of Christ’s birth.

I grew up in a “low church” background where liturgy, seasons, and rhythmic rituals are seen as suspect and unnecessarily showy. It’s only in recent years, in my participation in a weekly Vespers service, that I’ve come to recognize how much people need the flow of the liturgical calendar. It’s no wonder that many reports indicate that Gen Z is attracted to traditional expressions of liturgical worship despite it being “archaic.”

Since I hail from a non-liturgical church, I decided to tap my Catholic friend Thomas Salerno, an accomplished writer and podcaster, for his take. Thomas says he appreciates the structured rhythms and rituals of liturgy, which he feels draw him closer to understanding God’s narrative of salvation. In regard to Advent, he noted the season’s blend of joy and solemnity. While festive decorations and carols create a sense of celebration, the Mass during Advent reflects a more sorrowful mood with violet vestments and the omission of the joyful “Gloria in excelsis Deo” canticle. Also, sermons typically encourage the faithful to prepare spiritually for Christmas through acts of penance and self-discipline. Thomas sees the hymn “Veni, Veni Emmanuel” (“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”) as a perfect representation of Advent’s juxtaposition of joy and somberness, with its mournful verses and the uplifting refrain calling for rejoicing at Emmanuel’s coming.

Some traditions have a much more scattered approach to worship, where sermons each week depend on whatever the preacher is feeling—or felt when they were doing sermon series planning at the beginning of the year. But a liturgical calendar purposefully restricts content with the aim of allowing the full breadth of Scripture to speak. One of my professors in grad school explained that a liturgical structure telling you what to preach, say, sing, and, to some extent, feel, has the somewhat ironic advantage of freeing us from our personal human biases to focus on the themes that the universal Church immemorial has deemed important for preservation among the saints.

Religious or not, our lived experience shows that we think in terms of seasons. All of us intrinsically recognize that life has patterns, many of which appear again and again each year. It’s good for us to take a certain period of time to reflect on a certain series of themes. We require rhythm! As the timeless words of the Teacher remind us: “For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1).

Christmas music and the observance of Advent in Christianity both underscore the concept of ‘seasons’ in our lives. Just as Carey’s defrosting heralds the start of the Christmas season in popular culture, the beginning of Advent signals a shift in spiritual focus for Christian traditions. These seasonal rhythms, whether in religion or in pop culture, play a crucial role in setting our routines and centering our attention on specific ideas we might otherwise miss.

Jake Doberenz is an early career theologian and writer. He graduated with a Master of Theological Studies at Oklahoma Christian University. Jake writes a weekly newsletter focused on humor and faith at www.jakedoberenz.substack.com and tweets at @JakeDoberenz. His creative work can be found at. www.TheophanyMedia.com.