Dear DOD,
Why does our church use blue altar cloths for Advent? And why do some churches use purple? And why are the cloths white on Christmas and not red and green? Church colors are weird.
The Seekers in Children’s Chapel
Dear Seekers in Children’s Chapel,
Advent, celebrated in church on the four Sundays before Christmas, is an exciting time. Many of us anticipate a great holiday with much feasting, candy, cookies, and of course the exchange of lots of gifts. In the church year, Advent is actually a time of restraint and reflection. The color purple is associated with restraint and reflection. Purple is also used in Lent, another time of restraint and reflection. And, purple is associated with royalty, as we anticipate the celebration of Christ coming as our King.
Advent is also a time that we meditate on the miracle that a young woman, Mary, was chosen by God to bear the Christ child into our world. The color associated with Mary is blue. Blue is one of the rarest colors in nature if you exclude blue sky and the blue of water in lakes and oceans. The use of blue in churches seems to have originated in the Scandinavian countries. Blue dye, historically, was expensive and not widely used, so considered special. The earliest use of blue for liturgical ornaments in Great Britain occurred at the Cathedral in Salisbury in the 1500s.
In the paint and printing worlds, colors are denoted by the Pantone numbering system. The Pantone number for Marian Blue (Mary’s “official color”) is #2B4593. This shade of blue is composed of 17% red, 27% green, and 57% blue. (The Pantone number for Dodger Blue is #294.)
The red and green that we associate with Christmas comes from the winter solstice festivities of the pagan pre-Christians. Christians often adapted popular pagan customs and traditions into their own celebrations. The use of red and green seems to have arisen from the use of holly as a decoration because holly trees and shrubs survived winter snows and cold, providing green leaves and red berries. The green was to represent the goddess — nature and vegetation. The red represented the god — blood and life. Curiously, in Eastern Orthodox tradition, “Christmas” colors trend to blue and silver, denoting frost, ice, and cold.
The use of the color white to mark the great celebrations of the Christian year — Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost/Whitsunday (White-Sunday) — dates back to the earliest times of the organized church. The technology to render unbleached cotton or wool to a true white is fairly recent. In the early church, white, while possible, was rare and expensive. As a result, white was regarded as your very best. That is why we use white for major feasts in our churches.
By the way, what a great question!
Hope that this helps.
Dear Old Dad (DOD)
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