What Is Advent? A Season Built Around Waiting (It Starts 29 November 2026)

Advent is the four Sundays before Christmas. Because it is counted backwards, the start date moves each year.

In 2026 those Sundays are 29 November, 6 December, 13 December and 20 December. Christmas Day itself falls on a Friday.

Where the word comes from

"Advent" is the Latin adventus, meaning arrival or coming. And the Latin word was chosen to translate the Greek parousia.

Which is worth noticing: in the New Testament, parousia almost always refers to Christ's second coming, not his birth.

In other words, the season that commemorates his having come is named with the word for the coming that has not happened.

That is not an accident. Advent has faced both ways from the start: looking back at one arrival while waiting for another.

And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon… waiting for the consolation of Israel.Luke 2:25 (KJV)

It is not in the Bible

Worth stating plainly: Advent is not in scripture, and nobody is commanded to keep it.

It developed in the church somewhere between the fourth and sixth centuries, ran to different lengths in different regions at first, and only later settled at four Sundays.

So it is a tradition, not an instruction. Keeping it or not keeping it is not a matter of right and wrong.

Its colour is the same as Lent's

An often-missed detail: Advent is traditionally purple — the same colour as Lent.

The reason is that its historical mood was not festive but preparatory — quiet, restrained, with a penitential edge.

Advent has become a good deal more cheerful in many places, and there is nothing wrong with that. But knowing it was originally quiet explains why it puts the brightest day at the end.

It runs opposite to the countdown

The commercial Christmas season starts early, peaks in the days before the 25th, and stops the moment it arrives.

Advent runs the other way: four weeks of restraint and waiting, and then Christmas begins — traditionally followed by twelve further days.

The difference is practical: one puts the peak at the front, the other at the back.

The waiters in scripture

If the season needs a biblical figure, Simeon in Luke 2:25 fits: "waiting for the consolation of Israel."

That phrase covers centuries — between the last line of Malachi and Luke chapter 1 sit roughly four hundred years without a prophet.

The texture of that waiting is what Advent is built to remember.

How to keep it

No elaborate ritual is needed. The nearest thing to its original intent: read a short passage about the birth each day across the four weeks, rather than all at once.

Start at Isaiah 9 and work towards Luke 2. Prophecy first, then fulfilment — which is the shape of Advent itself.

Follow it in the BiblePro app. And do look for a local church to wait alongside others.