The Gift of Nostalgia

Christmas always makes me think of my grandfather. He died almost sixteen years ago of a sudden aneurism. I was a senior in college, newly engaged, and had never witnessed someone’s death before.

When I was a little girl, we spent every Christmas Eve at my grandparents’ home in Tennessee. Their property spanned more than fifty acres of a mostly wooded area, and their house was perched at the edge of a pond that froze over one Christmas when I was nine. Each year, my parents packed up the gifts along with my siblings and me, and we made the forty-five minute drive to the house by the pond where we could count on my grandfather to be waiting expectantly by the door.

Each year, my grandfather pulled his big silver wok from the kitchen cabinet and prepared a Christmas Eve stir-fry dinner. The air in his big kitchen was always thick with soy sauce and the scent of pork, sugar snap peas, and water chestnuts frying in oil. I have no idea what led to this tradition, but he was briefly stationed in Japan during World War 2, so perhaps that’s where his love for Asian cuisine came from. He was good at it for a white, retired chiropractor living in the woods in West Tennessee. I never thought to ask him why stir-fry was his go-to Christmas Eve dinner choice and if he’d give me the recipe, and now it’s far too late.

My grandfather loved Christmas when his family was all gathered together in one place. He often got choked up during the prayer before dinner, and the tears in his eyes when we packed our car to head home always worked up a knot in my throat, even when I was too young to understand why he was crying in the driveway.

Now that I’m raising two sons, I feel my grandfather’s tears in my eyes when I think about how soon the boys will be men who leave home and begin lives and families and Christmas traditions of their own. I both want it and dread it.

Nostalgia is a powerful substance that pulls me backward and pushes me forward and frightens me with the pace of life. We mark time with the sepia-toned pictures of pleasant memories around Christmas trees and gift-opening and big holiday dinners. But there is so much more life lived in the hundreds of days lived between holidays, it makes me wonder why we put so much emphasis on creating holiday memories for our children to draw from when they are grown.

In the Old Testament, the Israelites were given many feasts and celebrations to help them remember that it was God who delivered them from slavery in Egypt, God who provided atonement through the sacrificial system, God who delivered them from their enemies, God who brought them into the promised land, God who provided for their needs. The holy days of old were meant to remind them of God and, whether they realized it or not, to point to the forthcoming Messiah. So, in some ways, nostalgia could be used to anchor a people to their God and His faithful character.

I think we can do similarly today with our Advent traditions today. The traditions we weave around our holidays can serve as tools to remind us of the first coming of our Savior and to point us toward His second coming. Advent is a time of both relief and longing—relief that Christ has come, longing for Him to come again. In this way, we wrangle the power of nostalgia by looking backward and pressing forward with our eyes fixed on Jesus in either direction.

Building traditions, even small ones, can help us to remember where we came from, where we’re going, and how God was faithful and kind to redeem a people for Himself through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the baby in the manger. How we live the other 364 days of the year should be marked by the Savior we both celebrate and long for at Christmas.

Because here’s the thing about my grandfather and Christmas and all the things I remember—family wasn’t the most important thing to him. It was Jesus. Oh, he loved us dearly and cried when we left late at night on Christmas Eve, but we knew who he loved the most. We lived with my grandparents for nearly a year when I was eleven, and every single morning of that year I could find my grandfather seated on the couch with a cup of coffee, an open Bible, and a pen. He’d read out loud whatever Scripture he’d been studying to anyone who walked through the room during the early morning hour. When I visited in high school and college, my grandfather was never far from his spot on the couch with his Bible. I remember him like this more than anything else.

He died six months before my wedding, and when we all gathered around the hospital bed and sang hymns over him, what mattered most wasn’t the man who cooked in a wok at Christmas or who loved instant coffee or taught me how to bait a hook to go fishing in his pond. What mattered in the final moments was that we could hold his hands and say, “Go to Jesus. Just go easy to Jesus.” We could say it because the man we were losing loved the baby in the manger the most.

While I take the month of December to teach my sons about the coming of Christ—both the first and the next—I hope they remember the hundreds of days between the holidays and the couch and the Bible and the pen and the coffee because I have patterned my life after people I love who loved Jesus the most. And I pray that the traditions of both our holidays and our everydays are built around the One who came and is coming still.

Whether it’s Christmas morning or the most regular weekday we can imagine, our whole life should be threaded with the words “O come, let us adore Him.”