If Jesus is often forgotten in our Christmas celebrations, memories are not. Christmas is a festival of memories for many, a way of returning to the innocence and expectations of our early lives. Christmas is a holiday of nostalgia, among other things. We fill our cups with memories and stories of the past – family, gifts, a sense of joy and excitement. We bathe in the warm emotions of the past, we filter our remembrance through the rosiest of glasses.
Christmas sometimes seems a sea of roiling emotion. For many, the day after Christmas is the saddest day of the year. For some, the days before are the most troubling. And for many, the days are sentimental beyond reckoning, the joy almost painfully strong.
Although it is often portrayed one-dimensionally, as the Perfect Day Of Days, it is not always that simple a simple holiday to navigate. The happy and hypnotic marketing ads that run for months do not show the ripples and aftershocks, the reality of life for so many. For me, it is a holiday both of pleasure and sadness, each one connected to the other. And of sometimes great pressure.
Happy memories are the sweet side of nostalgia. The other side of nostalgia, the darker side, is that memories, by their very nature, are all in the past. They do not necessarily connect to the present. There is a quality of loss and wistfulness about nostalgia that is inherent in looking backwards.
Nostalgia by its very definition is a sad and painful sentiment, perhaps that accounts for so much of the angst that shrouds Christmas, along with the joy. The images and feelings of nostalgia are almost impossible to replicate or live up to. Perhaps that is why Graham Greene called Christmas the Feast Of Failure.
Nostalgia is generally defined as a sentimentality for the past, most frequently for a period or place or time of happy personal and emotional associations. The word nostalgia derives from the Greek language, it consists of the word nostros, meaning “homecoming,” and the Homeric word algos meaning “pain,” and “ache.”
The word, according to scholars, was first coined by a 17th century medical student to describe the anxieties of Swiss soldiers fighting far from home. It was considered to be a medical condition – a form of melancholy – an important symbol of Romanticism, the 18th century movement in arts and literature in Europe that emphasized inspiration, subjectivity and the primacy of the individual.
Most frequently, nostalgia is used to refer to what people call the “good old days” from the past and from one’s earlier life. Nostalgia has evolved from being seen as a kind of homesickness to something more positive, something considered to be an independent, sometimes uplifting emotion that can ease loneliness and increase social connectedness and mood. Nostalgia can bring good feelings as well as sad ones.
I feel and hear and see nostalgia most frequently and intensely during Christmas, when people recall warm family dinners, trips to see concerts and Christmas trees, moments with family, the suspension of arguments and tensions and normal activities like school, the giving of gifts. “Of course children love Christmas and remember it fondly,” wrote one analyst in a New York magazine some years ago. “Who doesn’t like to get presents? Christmas is hard to top the rest of the year or the rest of your life, it is a suspension of the complex realities most children and families face.”
Looking back, she said, few lives seem as happy or untroubled.
When my friends talk about Christmas, they have warm – sentimental – often happy memories to share. I hear very few bad memories of Christmas, except among the poor and the troubled. I find that the closer people were to their parents, the happier their memories of Christmas are likely to be. There is, for sure, something wistful about the memories I read and see, because they are all in the past.
Christmas is a personal and individual holiday, there are countless valid ways to feel about it and celebrate it – or not. Many people have chosen to separate the holiday from the ideology or passion of the man who inspired it – Jesus Christ, and that is the right of everyone to decide for themselves. Certainly the businesses that make tens of billions of dollars from the holiday have no use for its egalitarian origins.
In theory, Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ. It does not celebrate his beliefs.
The Christic ideology of simplicity, non-violence, humility, reverence for the poor, and the giving up of wealth and riches has not generally survived the American experience. But for me, nostalgia is at the heart of what makes the holiday so difficult to navigate. I loved getting presents, but even Christmas could not mask the problems I was having, or that my family was having. My memories of Christmas were not happy, neither were my memories of my parents or my childhood. I can hardly bear to speak of them, let alone recall them. So of course Christmas would be complex for me.
I know people who have fared better, taking the pain of their own childhood and transforming Christmas into a mystical and magical experience for their children, the nostalgia for the future.
For many years I thought I was alone in my dread of nostalgia – to me it is an emotional trap, a way of looking at the past that utterly distorts the present and keeps us from looking to what is most important – now and the future. I know not that I am not alone in these feelings. I think they are quite widespread.
I need to live in the present. It doesn’t really matter to me what happened to me as a child, what matters is what happens to me now, and will happen from today on. I don’t want to recall my life in terms of happy days a generation or more ago.I want to speak well of my life as it exists today, and feel good about it. That requires me to live in the present, to tell my stories of the present.
I understand this is not true for many other people, perhaps most other people.
I also understand that nostalgia is part of the reason me and so many others have had problems dealing with Christmas. I am a secular man, I do not celebrate or revere a holiday simply because it is on the religious calendar or exists and makes billions. I need it to make sense to me. Christmas has evolved far beyond the man who inspired it. This year I am getting somewhere. My Christmas does not come from the stories and memories and traditions of the past.
I do not worship Jesus Christ as a God, but I do love him as a man and understanding his message of love and harmony and concrn for the poor are helping me to make Christmas a precious and meaningful day again. My wife and I are re-casting the holiday in terms of the life I am now living with my wife, my new life and my new family. I am giving rebirth to my understanding of Christmas, and sharing it as best I can.
(In fairness, my wife is less interested in re-imagining the holiday that leaving most of it behind. I understand that completely.)
My hope and intention is for Christmas to be a simpler holiday, a happier and more meaningful one. I don’t want to feel bad the day after Christmas, and to struggle to live up to its sometimes sentimentalized and impossible expectations. Christmas ought to be within reach of me and everyone else, including the poor and less fortunate among us.
For me, memories are essential to self-awareness and awakening. But memories, like old swords and vases, belong in attics and museums. They are not where I live now.