Who can doubt the power of Christmas? If you are born and raised in Western Civilization, you cannot not react to the cultural tsunami surge of December 25th. Its drum beat is powerful and loud, a rhythm to which your soul will rock and sway even if you are keen to resist.
The collective psychological reach of Christmas is vast, operating in virtual independence of its specific Christian origins. The symbols and traditions of Christmas contain archetypes. Universal human motifs. Ideals like love, hope, hearth and home, redemption, new life, philanthropy, peace, family, children, innocence. Even romance (gotta love mistletoe!).
You are free, of course, to react to all this with cynicism. Or childlike wonder. Or contempt. Or joy. But you cannot not react.
Indeed, there is one reaction so common, so utterly human, as to be cliché. A goodly number of us don’t even recognize the symptoms. We just assume we are tired, or grouchy, or overly sentimental, or stressed. Or under the influence of a wee small dram of brandied egg nog. We feel a bit silly. For some people each year, it provokes crisis – pathos, conflict, depression, even suicide ideation.
The little bugger has a name: nostalgia.
Nostalgia is the thread of melancholy that ties together every holiday joy. It’s the nagging ache lurking just beneath the warmth, the smells, and the smiles. It’s the deep sigh. A contented familiarity attached to an inexplicable heaviness. A not quite comfortable psychic gravity. The unexpected scalpel slash of intense longing.
But, longing for what? Home, of course. Even if it’s a home we’ve never known.
Nostalgia comes from two Greek roots: nostos (= “returning home”), and algos (= “pain/longing”). It was coined originally as a medical term, referring to “the pain a sick person feels because he wishes to return to his native land, and fears never to see it again.”
Christmas evokes intense nostalgia because its symbols cast such an intense light on universal human ideals. This, in turn, exacerbates a universal human dilemma. To live meaningfully, we must sojourn in the harsh land between the way things are and the way they ought to be.
Hate and violence and despair aren’t it. No one should hit a child with a baseball bat. Death is not my enemy. We know these things as if we possessed some actual historical memory of a time when all was right with the world. As if we had once stood with Adam and Eve in Eden.
But the only way back home is forward. We hold tight to our ideals; indeed, draw needed strength from them as we endure and bravely engage all that is not yet good. All that still suffers and waits to be redeemed.
Nostalgia isn’t a bad thing. It can feed our souls. Nurture us.
When my youngest son was five years-old, he was unwilling to accept his lot as the shortest brother only hanging ornaments on the lower branches of the Christmas tree. He insisted I lift him high so he could participate in celebrations he could not reach. “Will I get to be with you on Christmas Day,” he asks, soberly.
“Yes, Joseph,” I say. “Absolutely.”
“Oh good,” he says, as he curls in my lap. Then, like a wise old man, “Because these are the special days.”
Oh dear boy. You have no idea. And the only reason I know is because a blessed agony named nostalgia keeps reminding me. Nostalgia keeps us yearning for places we’ve never been, yet somehow remember.
We long for what we cannot yet reach.
(Steven Kalas writes a regular column for the Sparks Tribune and he can be reached at skalas@marinscope.com.)
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