MGB:_Pilgims banned Christmas because in England it had become a Saturnalia. For some, it still is. Others have shifted their drunken revels to New Years Eve, which is why the Church has turned New Years to a Holy Day (as if anyone passed up a good drunk to go to Mass).
I don’t see either Advent or Christmas as penitential. We need God not because we are sinners but because we have an inborn urge to seek God in our darkest times, with no time being darker in the northern hemisphere than the winter solstice. It is Good Friday, where Jesus takes the role of the condemned, abandons his patrimony as he learned it from his mother from the Christmas story and his mission when abandoned John to care for his mother. He calls to God as we do, giving us access to God as never before.
At Christmas, we celebrate the divine patrimony of Jesus, which he takes into the lower reaches of the a Galilean house where the animals stay in to shelter from the April chill, like any peasant child. That is the glorious fact. The arguments about vertical and horizontal have always been silly and ego driven.
Our poverty of the spirit is endemic to our condition. It is only in seeking Christ that we can overcome it. We act in anger when we seek other things to overcome that poverty. It is only when we surrender to the child that we find the light.
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