Traveling during the holidays in Europe, you'll find the season marked not by the number of shopping days left until Christmas, but by a long series of winter festivals—both pagan and Christian—that stretch from late November until early January.
Advent (stretching four Sundays before Christmas) starts things off, as people begin to anticipate the arrival (or advent) of the baby Jesus. (In Europe, this is truly the start of Christmas. While some American-style early commercialization has begun to bleed through, for the most part European advertisers seem reluctant to market the season any earlier.)
