November has always been a month of not yet in my household. We have three family birthdays to celebrate: Two of my sons, and remembering my mother, in that order. When the children were young, I was quite firm about one thing: Christmas decorating, music, and movies could wait until after the second boy’s birthday. The shops might have their decorations up, the Christmas music might already be playing, and everyone else might be counting down the shopping days, but we had November things to celebrate first. I wanted each birthday to have its own place, without being swallowed up by Christmas.
I’ve always thought November gets rather shortchanged. October has its glorious colours and Thanksgiving celebrations. December has Christmas lights, familiar music, and all the excitement of the holidays. November, meanwhile, is often treated as something to get through. The leaves have fallen, the days are getting shorter, and the weather can’t quite decide whether it’s autumn or winter. We seem impatient to hurry along to something brighter.
But the Christian calendar isn’t quite ready for Christmas either. November begins with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, when we remember those who have gone before us. Remembrance Day asks us to honour those who served and sacrificed, and to consider the cost of war. As the church year draws to a close, our scripture readings turn toward questions of judgment, responsibility, and the future. These aren’t always comfortable subjects, but they are important ones.
There is something rather wonderful about a faith that makes room for endings. We don’t have to pretend that everything is cheerful all the time. We can acknowledge grief, remember people we miss, and recognize that life changes. We can look back with gratitude and regret, sometimes both at once. November gives us permission to do that without immediately rushing in to make everything feel better.
And yet November isn’t simply about endings. Christianity has always lived with the idea of already, but not yet. God’s kingdom is already breaking into the world through love, justice, compassion, and grace, but the world is not yet what God intends it to be. We see glimpses of goodness all around us, even while we know how much remains unfinished. We live somewhere between promise and fulfilment, between what has been and what might still become.
Perhaps that’s why waiting matters. Waiting doesn’t always mean sitting around doing nothing. Sometimes it means paying attention to what’s happening right in front of us. It means allowing a birthday to be a birthday, a memory to be remembered, a grief to be felt, and a question to remain unanswered for a little while. Not every moment needs to be hurried along to the next big thing.
Soon enough, Advent will arrive, and we’ll begin another season of waiting. We’ll light candles, hear the old promises, and prepare once again to celebrate the birth of Jesus. But even Advent isn’t Christmas. It has its own stories, its own questions, and its own invitation to watch for God at work in unexpected places. We lose something when we skip straight to the celebration without making room for the journey.
So I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to November before it’s properly begun. There are people to remember, birthdays to celebrate, questions to consider, and ordinary days worth living. Christmas will come in its own good time. For now, perhaps November’s gift is the gentle reminder that we don’t always have to rush toward what comes next. Sometimes there’s something important happening right here, in the not yet.
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