Nostalgia at heart of Christmas’ emotional highs, lows

Editor’s note: This is a special Christmas Day column from Review-Journal relationships columnist Steven Kalas.

He probably was born in summer, you know. So today is not his birthday. The Christian church picked today as both a political maneuver and a marketing strategy. How do you best evangelize pagans and consolidate the church as the Turks push the Roman Empire northward? Why, conscript the pagan calendar, pagan symbols and celebrations, and reinterpret them for the Gospel story, that’s how.

I’m not being facetious. It was a brilliant move. Join us. Accept the Gospel, and we’ll let you bring along your tannenbaums and mistletoe and Yule logs and Easter eggs, with the one qualifier that you discard any and all nymphs, fairies and deities contained therein. We’ll even plant Jesus’ birthday deep in the bosom of your High Holy Day: the winter solstice.

I wonder whether anybody back then intended the glaring irony of placing the Feast of the Nativity (Christmas) squarely on the winter solstice, the longest, darkest, often coldest night of the year. Think about it.

The Nativity story is about a "great light," yet that light arrives on the night of the greatest darkness. Christmas invites us to yet again risk hope in the goodness and meaning of life. Yet, on this night, most things seem bereft of life. Little is green. Water is ice. It’s cold as hell. Nature in suspended animation.

Christmas invites a renewed hope in love. Love is generative. Love generates hope. And babies. Lots and lots of babies. Newborns invite us to invest new hope, a clear and compelling reason for getting out of bed and hurling ourselves gladly into the fray.

The central symbol of the Christmas story is a baby.

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 Dec. 25th. Its drumbeat is powerful and loud, a rhythm to which your soul will rock and sway even if you are keen to resist.

But perhaps you will protest: "Not everyone is Christian, Steven."

Yep. But you buttress my point. Atheists exchange gifts. Buddhist children gaze in rapt wonder at Santa at the mall. Notwithstanding some unlucky pilots, police officers and convenience store clerks, you’re probably not working today, regardless of your religion or lack thereof. Schools are closed.

A practicing Jew will tell you that Hanukkah is the most minor of Jewish holidays, and nothing in its history includes the custom of gift exchange … except in North America. While Kwanzaa is based on ancient African traditions, it was invented in America by a college professor, in large part as a cultural counter-offensive to the dominant Euro-American traditions of Christmas.

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 such as 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 good 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 dram of brandied eggnog. 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 (meaning "returning home") and algos (meaning "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."

Remember the 1973 George Lucas film "American Graffiti?"

I loved it, was utterly entertained. And, as I drove home, I noticed a surprising feeling. I felt like crap.

I inquired to a friend. Why was this movie depressing? "The movie is about death," she said without a blink.

Oh, my. Yes. Each of those characters was standing at the doorway of their own exile. Their banishment. They were being forcibly evicted from home and childhood and innocence. They were each, in their own way, hanging on for dear life. But their efforts were, from the beginning, a lost cause.

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.

My 5-year-old, unwilling to accept his lot as the shortest brother only hanging ornaments on the lower branches, insists that I lift him high so he can participate in celebrations he cannot yet 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, he adds, "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 is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling and Wellness Center in Las Vegas. His column appears Sundays and Tuesdays in the Review-Journal. Contact him at skalas@reviewjournal.com.