Seriously. Check out my two favorite Episcopalian bloggers: Father Jake has to get over his snarkiness about mixing up Advent and Christmas, and PJ is all disgrumpled about “badly done liturgy” which sends her “into hysterics.”
We’re not attending our local Episcopalian church anymore for reasons unrelated to grumpy elitism and not something to go into in a blog, and there are a lot of things to miss about it, but that’s one thing I don’t miss.
Maybe it’s insecurity about the whole King James affair that permanently infected Anglican churches with this kind of reactionary prissiness; I don’t know.
We dislike most seeing that in others which we deny in ourselves, and this particular kind of crankiness — though not on this particular topic — is something I’m prone to in myself, though I don’t like it. So take this all as a confession disguised as an accusation.
Would it surprise you that one of my Christmas cards sternly admonished the recipient not to open it until the conclusion of Advent, and if they did to undertake seasonally-appropriate acts of penitence and piety? :)