What Is Advent? A Season of Waiting

Advent is the season that opens the Church's year: roughly four weeks of waiting that begin on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. In 2026 that Sunday falls on November 29, and the season runs through Christmas Eve, December 24. The word itself comes from the Latin adventus — arrival, coming. Advent is not an early start on Christmas; it is its own season, with its own color, its own readings, and its own quiet work: learning to wait well.

The first season of the Church's year

The Church does not begin its year on January 1. The liturgical year opens on the First Sunday of Advent, which means the new year starts not with resolutions but with expectation. Because Advent is anchored to Christmas rather than to a fixed date, its length shifts from year to year — anywhere from twenty-two to twenty-eight days. In 2026 it runs twenty-six days, with four full Sundays: November 29, December 6, December 13, and December 20 — and then the vigil of Christmas.

A double waiting

Advent looks in two directions at once. It remembers the first coming of Christ — the child born in Bethlehem — and it looks ahead to his second coming at the end of time. The readings of the season follow that order, perhaps surprisingly: the first weeks dwell on the end of history and the call to stay awake, and only in the final stretch, from December 17 onward, does the liturgy turn fully toward Bethlehem and the events just before the birth. Both directions are real waiting. One looks back at a promise kept; the other leans into a promise still open.

Why violet — and one Sunday of rose

The color of Advent is violet, the same color the Church wears in Lent. It signals preparation and a measure of restraint — not gloom, but a deliberate quieting before a feast. Advent is gentler than Lent: the Church calls it a season of devout and joyful expectation rather than penance. The exception arrives on the Third Sunday, called Gaudete Sunday from the Latin word for rejoice. The vestments turn rose, the third candle of the Advent wreath is pink, and the liturgy allows itself a visible smile: the feast is near. In 2026, Gaudete Sunday falls on December 13.

Waiting as a practice

Waiting is not something modern life trains anyone to do, which may be exactly why the Church begins its year with it. Advent proposes small, concrete habits: a wreath on the table, a few minutes of quiet, a daily portion of Scripture — the prophets who announced the coming, the psalms that long for it, and eventually the Gospel chapters that tell of it. None of this requires spare hours. It requires a decision to let December have a center other than the checkout line, and the season itself sets the pace from there. Advent begins on Sunday, November 29 — a good date to begin with it.