Ink of the Day Deep Reflection: The Christmas We Keep Inventing | On Seasonal Nostalgia, Memory, and the Past We Need to Have Had 📚 #WritingCulture
The loss we feel in December is often the loss of a story we invented to comfort ourselves.
I write about seasonal nostalgia as fabrication, but notice how confidently I arrange these sentences about Christmas past, as if recognizing invented memory exempts me from inventing. Right now, selecting which childhood moment proves my point, I choose the memory that makes me appear thoughtfully uncertain rather than simply confused about what actually happened. The performance of questioning nostalgia becomes another rehearsed memory to deploy next December.
When I claim to remember how Christmas felt as a child, I do not return to what happened. I return to the version I have polished over years of retelling, the one that preserves a self who once experienced wonder without staging it. The mind fills gaps not with what was there but with what the story needs: genuine joy, authentic excitement, a time before I learned to curate feeling. I call this reconstruction “memory” because admitting I invented my own innocence would mean I never had the unperformed self I use to anchor everything since.
Even the melancholy of Christmas, that bittersweet recognition that it is not like it used to be, depends on believing it once was like something. But perhaps those childhood Christmases were already theater: learned enthusiasm for gifts I did not want, scripted gratitude, the role of wonderstruck child enacted for adults who needed to witness authentic joy to justify their own nostalgia. The past I long for may have been longing for its own past, an infinite regression of staged authenticity with no origin point.
I suspect seasonal nostalgia is not about the past at all, but about proving to myself I once existed without construction. The decorations I arrange just like I remember create the Christmas I needed to have had. Next year I will remember this arrangement, forgetting it was already invented, and the cycle continues. What I call tradition is the sedimentation of previous rituals, each layer hiding that there may be nothing beneath.
Writing this, I am doing it again. I describe nostalgia as fabrication while building the identity of someone who sees through assembly. The sophisticated observation becomes the costume. If I stopped performing seasonal nostalgia, stopped claiming to remember authentic wonder, stopped curating the melancholy of lost innocence, would anything remain? Or only winter, obligations, and the anxiety that made me learn to feel nostalgic so convincingly.
Reflection
Writing about Christmas nostalgia produces the nostalgia of having written about it. Each sentence pretends to recover what was lost but creates certainty that I grasp how loss works. The question I cannot answer: if I stopped interrogating seasonal memory, would anything remain, or only the fear that made me learn to question so carefully.
A quiet gratitude to the Christmas season itself, whose magic inspires our annual meditation on wonder, and to all who have longed for the authenticity of childhood Christmases while forgetting those moments were already performances, discovering that the innocence we protect most fiercely is often the innocence we needed to have invented.
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