Have you ever said: “I wish December could be less frantic?” Well, this December will be less frantic—in ways no one would have wished.

It’s Advent Lockdown. Depending on where you live, Advent Lockdown could mean specific disappointments like a beloved theatrical performance that will not occur. Or it could mean you are locked out of nearly everything your family needs and wants to do.

One thing is certain. December 2020 will be void of events that ordinarily define the season. Gone will be onerous drives to rehearse for pageants. The beauty and hilarity of those pageants will be gone too. Missing will be oceans of calories from towers of sweets at parties, as will the camaraderie occasioned by those parties. The pressure of preparing massive holiday dinners will be reduced for some families, but so too will be the memories made round the Christmas table.

Insofar as performing arts organizations, their calendars are decimated. Do you know the joke about how The Nutcracker and A Christmas Carol keep companies from bankruptcy? It’s true. Many of our long-established ensembles and festivals will not survive this period. To whatever degree that you can support organizations trying to keep the ship afloat by bringing us virtual facsimiles of performances, you are doing a good thing.

Meanwhile, as our treasured cultural traditions fall away, what will fill the gap? Remember the old phrase: Nature abhors a vacuum. So let me offer a two-pronged approach.

First, it is good to concentrate on blessings. Unexpected blessings have filled the vacuum for of us over the past months, like more time to teach skills to kids and grandkids, a chance to plant a garden, or energy to learn new things ourselves! Thinking ahead, could we not use the one acknowledged gift of this lockdown—extra time—for seasonal activities that always seemed too ideal to fulfill? Perhaps this is a chance to pull out great-grandma’s pastry recipes, along with her fragile china. Maybe the closets cleaned during spring lockdown yielded craft projects started 15 years ago that beg to be completed. For that matter, I am predicting that Christmas Cards will make a comeback (wouldn’t that be delightful?).

Other traditions, rarely practiced in our modern world, could flourish once again too: In lieu of pageants at church, children could recreate pageants at home. If so, they follow what children around the world have done for time immemorial by singing, acting, making costumes and props, and even staging puppet theater. Other quiet traditions that rarely out-shout the noisiness of commercialized December may also take wings in our lives.

All of this is good. But, as a second prong to our approach, may I issue a caution?

Yes, our “creative adjustments” this year have been admirable. But we humans are impoverished without a wider community. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (who died earlier this month) earned world-wide respect for sheaves of writings on issues of our times, particularly the lack of morality and our fractured communities.

Starting with the ways our “covenantal community” has been battered by secularism, he wrote:

What the secularists forgot is that Homo sapiens is a meaning-seeking animal. The tyranny of technology and waves of progressive thought wracking our lives may indeed give us choices, but [they] don’t teach us how to choose. They provide neither identity nor the set of moral sensibilities that are inseparable from identity: loyalty, respect and reverence.

So here’s a call to action for Advent 2020: What can we do to nurture ideals of loyalty, respect, and reverence? How can we lessen the sense of isolation for our families and for those around us? What gestures of joy can we give to someone discouraged, shut in, or hurting? What decisions, small or large, can we enact to strengthen our own spiritual community? Actually this charge is present during every season of any calendar year. But this year, the charge is more pressing.

For our part in this, this eleventh (!) annual Advent Calendar will be dedicated to bringing you splashes of joy by featuring interesting works of music, art, and literature, as well as sprinklings of beautiful traditions. We hope to open a few new doors and spotlight some old favorites. Yes, I will revisit that most beloved work Amahl and the Night Visitors to highlight a song that has the potential to energize your whole household! Also I will return to Hector Berlioz’s gorgeous oratorio L’Enfance du Christ, foregoing the charming middle act devoted to the manger scene to explore Berlioz’s first-act musical focus on the Christmas story’s great villain, King Herod. Other songs and stories beloved during the Christmas season will play a role too.

Advent was and is a spiritual preparation for Christmas. How long it has begged for the kind of attention that usually is hard to give: quiet, prayer, reassessment, and fasting. These qualities are hardly the recipe our culture ordinarily glorifies during December!

Relying upon the often-untapped strength of our faith, we can reaffirm our highest ideals and dedicate ourselves to rebuilding our covenantal community. After this undeniably difficult year, we may find that our hearts are more open to the blessings of Advent and its power to erase our anxieties and bring peace as we move towards the Feast of Christmas.