This year, Christmas carol services are expected to draw their largest congregations since the pandemic. As numbers attending carol services swell, one central London church has appealed to its regular congregation to donate 12,000 mince pies to give away. Even in the wake of shocking revelations of religious abuse in recent years, those who rarely engage with faith may still find themselves stepping into cathedrals and parish churches this Christmas season. But why will we go? What are we looking for?
Can all this sentimentalised longing really be good for us?
The sights and sounds of Christmas stir emotions of altruism and goodwill, of warmth and cosiness, of well-being and belonging. The imagination flickers with images of toasted teacakes dripping in butter and slippers warming by a crackling fire. The German language even has a word for that special sense of ‘cosy’ we associate with home: gemütlichkeit.
There’s another emotion woven into the fabric of the Christmas season too: nostalgia. Nostalgia is about longing – equal parts warmth and wistfulness, a bittersweet longing for a past that seems familiar and yet just beyond our reach. The Welsh have a version of nostalgia they call hiraeth: yearning for a time or place that may never be again – and perhaps never truly was.
But can all this sentimentalised longing really be good for us? Back in the 17th century, a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer coined the term ‘nostalgia’ by combining the Greek words ‘nostos’ (homecoming) and ‘algos’ (pain). He was describing symptoms of fevered insomnia and melancholia he’d noticed among soldiers fighting far from home. Since then psychologists and psychiatrists have consistently viewed nostalgia as a dysfunctional emotion – a way of evading the challenges of the present by cocooning ourselves in romanticised versions of the past.
And what better example than the magic of Christmas? With its frosted shop windows, flickering candles, a miser frightened into being nice to the deserving poor, and a baby crying in a manger, it’s sentimental nostalgia on steroids: exhibit number 1.
But it turns out this overly negative view of nostalgia doesn’t hold up. Recent research shows that while it is indeed bittersweet and can slide into unhealthy escapism, for most of us, it’s a positive and rewarding emotion. We experience nostalgia often – and occasionally actively seek it out.
Nostalgia can be a powerful motivator, too, fuelling our determination to confront and surmount the challenges that come our way. Much like Odysseus, whose yearning for home empowered him to overcome the obstacles the gods had strewn in his way, nostalgia can buttress our determination and forge resilience too.
So, why do we come to church at Christmas? Perhaps because, consciously or unconsciously, we want to experience everything nostalgia and the other emotions of the season have to offer. Because we long for a better world, a better version of ourselves. We crave the hope that, for just one hour at least, despite everything, life might still make sense. And why shouldn’t we?
So in the spirit of the season, let me press a little further into the world of longing and desire. C.S Lewis, the author of the Christmassy children’s classic ‘The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe’ often explored themes of longing and desire, as they played a pivotal role in his own journey to faith. Lewis was intrigued by a type of longing distinct from nostalgia, yet equally resonant during the Christmas season. It’s captured by the German word sehnsucht – an intense, almost inconsolable ache for something we can’t fully grasp, but instinctively sense is there. For Lewis this longing was more than an emotion; it was a clue. In his journey from atheism he came to believe it was a pointer to the Divine, intricately woven into the human soul – a homing signal from another world.
The great atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche – he of ‘God is dead, and we have killed him!’ – also sensed this ‘pull’ from another world and warned of its dangers. As a lover of great music and beauty himself, Nietzsche understood how profoundly they stir the human spirit, making it painfully difficult to bid the transcendent its final farewell.
“At a certain place in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” he wrote, “[a person] might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards. If he becomes aware of his condition, he may feel a deep stab in his heart and sigh for the man who will lead back to him the lost beloved, be she called religion or metaphysics. In such moments, his intellectual character is put to the test.”
Why do we come to church at Christmas?
So enjoy the experience, says Nietzsche, but stay on your guard – especially during a Christmas carol service. In a godless world of blind materialism, you are longing for a home that neither does nor can exist. No angel appeared. No baby in a manger. There is no Jesus born ‘to save his people from their sins’. There’s just you. And your sins. So get over it.
But Lewis couldn’t get over it. Rather, encouraged by Tolkien, he decided to press on into it before finally realising:
“The beauty, the memory of our own past, are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
Nietzsche would have dismissed Lewis’s intellectual journey as a surrender of autonomy and strength. But for Lewis it was a triumph of joy: a logical worldview that united powerful emotions with the rigour of his formidable intellect. After years of searching, he had finally found his spiritual home.
So if you attend a carol service this year, be on your guard. Remember the swirling emotions of gemütlichkeit, nostalgia and sehnsucht – all up to their old tricks again. Unless, of course, we were to let down our defences just one more time, engage our intellect and see where it takes us. Like Lewis, we may even find ourselves taking first hesitant steps toward faith. And that, as Lewis’ Aslan might remind us, would be ‘deep magic’.
Comments