Haunted by the Ghosts of Christmases Past

How nostalgia gives me hope.

Every Advent, I am overwhelmed by nostalgia.

Physically, it is 2024 and I am thirty years old, but mentally it is 2005 and I’m eleven years old and my two older brothers are home from college and they take naps on the couch because they’re worn out from finals and I’m annoyed that I can’t watch TV after school but I’m so glad they’re home.

Each Advent, I pull my Grandma Peg’s sequined sweater from a box and try to slip it on without getting it caught in my hair, and I remember how my grandma smelled like perfume and cigarette smoke. After dinner, I put on a record of a pipe organ playing carols and suddenly I’m back in the pews of my college’s chapel at the Christmas candlelight service trying not to get the giggles while sitting by my friends. I bake dozens of cookies because my mom always does, too, and I remember the Christmas she made hundreds of pieces of chocolate chip biscotti for my brother’s wedding when I was fourteen years old which I thought was grown up but in retrospect, I was just a kid. I set my table with my Grandma Peggy Jean’s Pfaltzgraff dishes because when you move into a nursing home, your granddaughter takes your dishes.

In many ways, this time of year makes me long for a life that felt simpler — to travel back to my childhood Christmases in the wallpapered living room of 3072 Main Street — to return to an age when my stomach could eat copious amounts of the Christmas Eve cheese platter without consequences. But that’s not the way life seems to go.

Differences with loved ones that once felt like rounded corners now feel sharp; I run into them and get a bruise. I feel grief for my nephew who only lived six hours on this earth and I feel grief for the pain in my friend’s voice on the other side of the phone and I feel grief for things that haven’t even happened yet. At the metaphorical holiday party, I dip my moose mug into the punch bowl of nostalgia and I am tempted to get drunk on it. Sobriety of any sort seems harder this time of year.

Nostalgia can be dangerous, they say. Better to stay focused on the present. I suppose that perpetually longing for the past or drinking too much from the punch bowl of nostalgia is quite unhelpful. But I also think that remembering the past, and even longing for it, can serve in a spiritually beautiful and rich way, too. In one of my favorite pieces on Mockingbird, my friend Nate explored the redemptive nature of nostalgia, writing,

“Nostalgia is not a deceptive repression mechanism of the psyche that tries to cover over our memories with a pleasant veneer; it is the deep emotional response to the glimpses of eternal joy which we experience here and now in painfully ephemeral moments. We don’t truly want to return to the moments themselves when they are recalled, we want to return to the joy that they intimated to us in our very souls: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” Nostalgia provides hope to us as it reveals a desire for union with something beyond ourselves and acts as a barometer of our deepest longing: the hope of redemption in Jesus Christ. Yet all along those glimmers of joy are short lived, and our myopic view of suffering tempts us to abandon hope altogether. Hope, if it is hope at all, must come from outside the futility to which creation has been subjected. Hope must come in some way through transcending the entrapments of a world in captivity to time and decay. Nostalgia simultaneously reveals to us hope’s presence and its very precarious position in this vale of tears.”

During Advent 2024, at the end year when I’ve wished I could be eleven again or that the sweater still smelled like my grandma’s bad habits or that the passed-down dishes were not mine yet, I have found old memories and old words to be a soothing salve, a glimmer of joy, an invitation to hope.

God showed up before. Advent is a promise that he will do again.

Sometimes the Bible seems dusty in a bad way and sometimes it is dusty in a glorious way, in a needed way — in a way that is tried and tested and true. How comforting it is to read the old words of the Psalmist and realize that thousands of years ago, people related to God in the ways we do now. These old words come from the Book of Common Prayer’s liturgy for the second Sunday of Advent:

1 When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,
then were we like those who dream.

2 Then was our mouth filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy.

3 Then they said among the nations,
"The LORD has done great things for them."

4 The LORD has done great things for us,
and we are glad indeed.

5 Restore our fortunes, O LORD,
like the watercourses of the Negev.

6 Those who sowed with tears
will reap with songs of joy.

7 Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed,
will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.

— Psalm 126 Page 782, BCP

Some days, hope in the time of Advent is tough to muster. Hope is certainly a salve for my bruises, but there’s no denying that I’m still marked—sometimes the bruise still aches, and the black and blue has not faded as I would’ve wished. Right now, the story of each of our lives contains brokenness and bitterness, sin and suffering, hopelessness and helplessness. We pine for the past and long for a life that maybe existed a while ago or only existed in our dreams.

But throughout the pages of God’s Word, I am comforted by the ancient yet timely reminders that Jesus’ resurrection can fill us with hope right now because death was and is no match against our Messiah. Even when I feel haunted by the ghost of Christmases past and feel caught up in the swirling of the present, God is generous to remind me that “He remembers his covenant forever, the promise he made, for a thousand generations.” (Psalm 105:8)