How about not having Advent next year!

In my first years of church ministry I tried to follow the revised common lectionary and remember Advent. I did it because I felt I had to. I didn't want to go straight from the ordinary time of autumn to their special time of Christmas without something in between. But I do not find that the present lectionary suggestions really help. They are way off what most parishes and congregations are doing socially in December. If you are in a supermarket in the second week of December you will be surrounded by Christmas food, wrapping paper, cards and present ideas as the carols and secular Christmas music play on the loudspeakers. And then you go into a traditional church and find that they refuse to sing carols until Christmas eve and the preaching will relate to stories of the apocalyptic second coming and John the Baptist. It misses the zeitgeist of people cranking slowly up into party mood.
These traditionalists tell us we can sing carols for the twelve days of Christmas but once you get beyond the 26th December who wants to hear another version of "Away in a Manger". (actually who wants to hear this carol EVER but that's another rant!) We have Epiphany when we should properly think of the wise men and their gifts but their story has been squeezed already in the popular imagination into the conflated Christmas story itself. Again the church has lost the zeitgeist.
But what if we designated a certain number of days after Christmas and new year as penitential days for serious fasting and abstinence. We could use the weird apocalyptic readings on these days and add to them many penitential readings that always make people feel bad about themselves. We could then resonate perfectly with the feeling that many have as a result of ten days of overindulgence. I wonder would this work?