Christmas is over, right?

For many Americans, Christmas is already fading rapidly in the rearview mirror. On Dec. 26, stores were hanging out their banners for after-Christmas sales and turning off their Christmas background music, while millions of Americans went so far as to cart their Christmas trees to the curb. But in more traditional Christian cultures, Christmas was just getting started, with the Twelve Days of Christmas set to run up until Epiphany, which is tomorrow. Some even keep it up until Candlemas on Feb. 2. Although certainly no Biblical requirement, these fading traditional practices offer lessons well worth recalling in our culture of immediate gratification.

Those still familiar with references to the Twelve Days of Christmas might imagine it was merely a medieval Catholic practice. But it survived the Reformation, except in the handful of churches that abolished Christmas altogether, and remains traditional in Anglican, Lutheran, and French Huguenot congregations, among others. Its abandonment by the larger culture, in favor of the monthlong shopping frenzy beginning the day after Thanksgiving, seems to be a distinctively modern and American contribution.

Why does it matter, some might ask, if we now celebrate Christmas as ending on Christmas Day rather than beginning on it? Both traditions celebrate the day itself, and both celebrate a longer season of lights, carols, good food, and gift-giving. Nonetheless, calendars form culture, and we should not be surprised if our reordering of time reorders our habits and priorities.

For one thing, the older practice of Christmas encouraged a culture of delayed gratification. The Advent season preceding Christmas, although sometimes coinciding with Christmas-like cultural festivals like the Dutch Sinterklaas, was not a time of celebration per se, but of waiting and expectation, of looking and straining toward the coming of the King. As such, it was a period of self-denial, of waiting for the coming feast—or even, in many traditional churches, of actively fasting. By this discipline, generations were habituated in the understanding that “good things come to those who wait.”

Of course, children today must still learn to wait expectantly for and open gifts on Christmas morning (or at least Christmas Eve), but adults rarely model this deferred gratification, with Christmas parties, Christmas cocktails, and Christmas concerts dominating the social calendar before Dec. 25. And in the traditional Christmas, delayed gratification did not end on Christmas Day. The first gifts might be opened that day, but the last were not unwrapped until Jan. 5 or 6. Good things might come to those to wait, but even then, they weren’t going to come all at once.

Perhaps even more significant, then, has been our culture’s loss of a practice of sustained gratification. More and more, we have become a one-and-done society. Movies that used to run for months on end are now likely to sell out their midnight showings and then quickly forgotten. Marriages that were once seen as lifelong commitments fizzle out as soon as the initial spark fades. Even dating culture has given way to a “hookup culture” of one-night stands. A momentary burst of excitement is followed almost as quickly by a crush of disappointment—or, even worse, apathy—as the looked-for pleasure proves ephemeral rather than life-changing. Increasingly rare is the experience of a long, slow, burn of inextinguishable joy, of a gift that keeps on giving.

And yet, of course, that is exactly what Christmas is—or should be. Our society’s contemporary celebration of Christmas, inasmuch as it has any link to Christianity, is implicitly Gnostic—celebrating a Son of God who comes as a mere fleeting apparition to briefly illuminate a darkened world before vanishing back into the heavenly realm whence He came. It certainly does not encourage us to think of a Christ who has come in the flesh, to dwell among us, reign over us, and return in glory. When a long-absent loved one is coming to stay, you don’t party for the month leading up to it and then get back to work the day after his arrival; you celebrate together every day of the visit. For Christians, indeed, 12 days is hardly enough—Christ has come to stay, as the gift that keeps on giving every day of our lives.

None of this is to say that the loss of the Twelve Days of Christmas is the chief culprit for our culture of immediacy, or that its restoration would by itself suddenly give us a new perspective on reality. But liturgy and our sense of time do shape life, and if we want to put Christ back in Christmas, perhaps we should stop putting the decorations back in their box as soon as we celebrate His arrival. Instead, perhaps, we can remind our one-and-done culture once a year that the greatest joys are indeed the most lasting joys.

So, in the best sense of the Christian celebration of the birth of the Savior, Merry Christmas. The greeting may seem very odd in the first days of January, but maybe that’s the point.