Just what is a “Yule log” anyway? I recently wondered aloud to a group of friends. “I think it’s like a cheese ball,” one
friend said. “No, it’s a branch off the Christmas tree,” suggested another.

It turns out that neither guess is correct. A Yule log, as I found out later, is an old Scandinavian tradition that, like many others, evolved over the centuries to become the custom it is today.

Many of our modern Christmas traditions — the things we eat, the songs we sing, the rituals we perform — have resulted from the convergence of customs and observances from
around the world. In fact, some — Santa Claus, for instance — were invented to purposely change the way people observed the season.

Though I grew up celebrating Christmas with my Italian Catholic family, some things still puzzled me. Was Santa really a saint? What, exactly, are the twelve days of Christmas? And why are the animals said to talk at midnight on Christmas Eve?

So, I scoured the Internet and flipped through a handful of books on the subject, and while there undoubtedly is more to these customs than space here allows, I offer some brief descriptions of some of the customs that mark our celebration of the season of Jesus’ birth.

Happy New Year: Advent is the beginning of the Church year and is the time Catholics use to prepare for Jesus’ birth and his Second Coming. We do this by prayer and penance, but also by cleaning our homes, baking and cooking, and marking the days with Advent candles that are lit each Sunday of Advent, or a calendar with little
windows that are opened each day to reveal a picture underneath. These are all ways to help us wait for Christmas with what the Church calls “joyful expectation.”

In 2006, Advent lasts from December 3 to December 24. The Advent wreath, writes Meredith Gould in The Catholic Home, is made of fresh evergreens encircling four equidistant candles. Three violet candles represent penitence and one pink candle symbolizes the anticipated joy of Christ’s birth.