We decorated our Christmas tree a few days ago, with hand-me-down ornaments and candy canes clustering densely toward the bottom of the tree (none of the candy canes hang higher than chest high). The decorations brought back so many memories that I seemed to be seeing a kind of Christmas palimpsest, a double-vision of the past and present superimposed: the wooden stars and snow-flakes my four-year-old and I painted last year; the bells with ribbons and tulle that I made when I was fourteen and my mom put me in charge of homemaking for her Relief Society, arguing that I was more “crafty” than she was; the strands of red lights that we inherited from my parents, and that caused my mother so much grief because my dad didn’t want any other kind and the all-red lights were hard to find.
Memory is a funny—and fascinating—thing. Not just the physical pathways (which I don’t pretend to understand), but the way that memory and narrative intertwine—the way that stories shape our memories, and the ways that memories present themselves in story form (often neater in recollection than they were in the experiencing). Maurice Halbwachs called the narrative aspect of memory “frameworks,” and argued that as cultures, we share certain cultural blueprints that give shape and meaning to our memories by suggesting what aspects of events should be remembered: the food, the family rituals, the decorations. Interestingly, by pointing us toward the routine, these frameworks actually serve to highlight the exceptional.
Like the Christmas when I was fifteen, and we found out that one of my friends’ older brothers had died unexpectedly. Her family had been saving for months to buy a new TV for Christmas; instead, the money went towards funeral costs. So my friends and I—a little high on the novelty of real service—pooled our own meager resources and bought them one. I still remember the shocked look on the family’s faces when they realized that the TV box we brought them did, in fact, hold a TV.
Or the Christmas five years ago, when (in what became for me a profound kind of confluence), I was expecting my first child, a son. When the speaker in the ward Christmas program began reading from Luke 2, the story became real for me in a way it had never been before. I put my hands on my swollen belly, feeling the baby kick and squirm beneath my hands, and wondered: Is this what Mary was feeling, on that long, uncomfortable ride to Bethlehem? This strangely mingled sense of physical discomfort and spiritual awe?
That year we spent Christmas Day in the hospital (my son was born Christmas Eve)—both our families were on the other side of the country, so we had that quiet room to ourselves: my husband, myself, my son. As the last bit of winter sunlight slanted across our room, I nursed my new baby and thought about the miracle of new life—and about the miracle of resurrection, that miracle promised in the birth of the Savior. That year, Christmas was short on presents (as graduate students, we didn’t have much money anyway), but I remember it as one of the most spiritually profound Christmases of my life. Even now, it’s impossible for me to think about Christmas without that dual memory: the birth of my son (my firstborn son) and the birth of my Savior. And when I tell my son about the story of Christmas, I tell him about his own birth, too.
In the scriptures, we find continual injunctions to “remember.” Why? Scholars of memory suggest that one distinction between memory and history is that history is a dry, artificial connection to the past (built through analysis and interpretation of artifacts) and that memory is a lived experience. In our faith, believing as we do in the construction of a vital link between generations (through family history work and temple sealings), perhaps memory helps us make these links more real. But I also think that our memories of the past are significant because *what* we remember so strongly influences *who* we are: what we remember is mostly narrative, a selection of significant events that we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives. If we remember scriptural stories (and their application in our lives), then we are more likely (I believe) to live lives inflected by spiritual meaning.
If Thanksgiving is a holiday for giving thanks, then perhaps Christmas is a season for remembering—not just remembering Christmases past, but remembering that Christ is at the heart of Christmas. Some of my most poignant memories of Christmas are those where I found myself re-membering Christ: not just thinking of him, but physically embodying him in my actions.
What significant memories do you have of Christmas? How do these memories enrich your current experience of Christmas?
What other experiences do you regularly try to create to make Christmas—and your memories of it—more memorable?
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