Walk into almost any store in December (or even November), and you’re greeted by an unmistakable palette: red and green everywhere. There’s that Christmas parasite we call mistletoe , causing its usual round of awkward social encounters, along with ornaments, wrapping paper, sweaters, and signage—all of it decked out in brilliant reds and greens. Christmas, we assume, simply is red and green. These colors feel timeless, natural, even inevitable. But what if red and green aren’t quite as original as we think? What if the church’s oldest instincts around Christmas—and especially Advent—were shaped by a different set of colors altogether? And what if recovering those colors might help us recover something of the season’s deeper theological meaning? This isn’t an argument against red and green. They’re beautiful, beloved, and here to stay. Rather, it’s an invitation to notice that blue (or purple) and pink have a much older and more explicitly theological relationship to the season of Adv...