Now begins the holiday season, our annual extravaganza of travel, shopping, worshipping, eating and deep emotions.

Some treasure every moment of it. Some look anxiously for gold amid the dross of hyper-everything. Some sink into a seasonal funk.

Our economy kicks into now-or-never mode. In our fundamental nature as nomads on a journey with God, the next five weeks tell us volumes about who we are and who God is to us. We are a commercial culture.

Maybe we should be a higher-browed culture grounded in academy, arts and altar. But in fact, we make goods and services for people to buy. We aren’t exactly a “nation of shopkeepers,” as Napoleon dismissively termed Great Britain.

But the economic engine of modern America is stoked by consumer spending and small businesses. No matter how much wealth financial firms grab, value and capital are created in the daring, doggedness and inventiveness of entrepreneurs.

This is their season. The day after Thanksgiving isn’t called “Black Friday” because it is gloomy, but because a four-week shopping surge tips countless enterprises into the “black” and out of the “red.”

Yet we are also a family culture.

A modern Currier & Ives would paint “family” differently — more single-parent families, blended families, same-gender couples, childless couples, mixed-ethnicity families, non-English-speaking families, unemployed families.

But listen to the joys and sorrows of this season, and you will hear family stories: children coming home for Christmas, soldiers not coming home, loved ones too poor to come home, turkey-centered celebrations or the longing for such togetherness, buying “perfect gifts” for loved ones or wishing one had money to spend, or loved ones to honor.

This can be a difficult season. Ours is a lonely age.

These next weeks are prime time for suicide and worsening addictions. Many people who get along fine during other seasons feel unusually sad and isolated during these holidays. Such feelings are the fount of true holiness, of course, as Jesus said in the Beatitudes.

They lead us to holy ground, and that ground isn’t a lavish liturgical spectacular. It is more likely to be an act of kindness, a shopkeeper’s smile, a friend’s invitation, a telephone call, a clinging to sanity through prayer and the fellowship of the broken. Despite hackneyed sermons about “putting Christ back into Christmas,” these glimpses of the divine reveal the “reason for the season.”

I, for one, have no clue how I will buy presents for loved ones in this recessionary year. But I know that our middle son and his girlfriend have come home from California for Thanksgiving Day — our 33rd year as a family.

I know that my wife and I will go shopping, always wishing we could do more, but experiencing holy time because we do it together. I know I will write at a deeper emotional level during this season.

I know the moment will come when I stand to sing “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” I will remember in an instant every Christmas we have shared, as well as the ones that went before and the people who are absent. I will taste the pathos of being human and the abiding love of a God who shares this journey.

I probably won’t be able to form the words; too much will be happening inside. But in a manner of God’s choosing, I will be “joyful and triumphant.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of Just Wondering, Jesus, and the founder of the Church Wellness Project.)