That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

Not the most festive of openings, but Christmas is about darkness as well as light, and the sonnet is in the key of bleak midwinter. We know roughly what year Christ was born – although, since it was before Herod died, it may have been a few years B.C. But about the month of his birth we know nothing. December 25 echoes the pre-Christian pagan festivals, embodying their hopes – of spring, rebirth, eternal life – in Christ’s coming. Yet the three magi, those strange Zoroastrian visitors, also brought myrrh, a perfumed embalming oil and a symbol of death, as one of their gifts.

Feasting acquires some of its savour from knowing it will not last, and neither will we. Midwinter is a reminder of this

Christmas is a time of doubt and even despair, its traditions our inherited response to the icy dark that falls inside as well as out. The short days and the miserable weather affect our spirits, as they did our ancestors. And winter, like myrrh, stirs us to thoughts of mortality. Feasting acquires some of its savour from knowing it will not last, and neither will we. Midwinter is a reminder of this.

Each year we remember the ghosts of Christmas past – including many that are welcome. I have baubles on my tree chosen by hands that were once small but are no longer. We have recollections of the baubles of our own childhoods, and the ramshackle Christmas traditions that shape every family’s story. Our sense of self is built like geology: from sediment slowly laid down, from sudden volcanic eruptions, and from the relentless metamorphosis of time. Anniversaries, of which Christmas is one, bring back thoughts of the years behind, the years that shape us. ‘I am a part of all that I have met,’ the youthful Tennyson had the aged Ulysses say, in the poem Tennyson wrote at the beginning of his lifelong grief for Arthur Hallam.

Mistletoe and holly, both evergreen, easily became symbols of hope, and hope of eternity. Tennyson’s In Memoriam was full of doubt, with its terrified bewilderment over nature’s indifference, not only to the survival of individuals, but of species and genera. His generation discovered Deep Time, that the Earth was not six thousand years old, and that the geography of millennia had wiped out mountains and seas and all memory of the creatures that lived in them. Against the eternal winter of oblivion, remembrance becomes an act of hope. Richard Holmes’s recent biography, The Boundless Deep, summons up Tennyson’s uncertainties marvellously, and reminds me of hours spent submerged in his unforgettable accounts of Coleridge and Shelley. Memory is so often a chain where each link tugs on the next.

Tennyson said Ulysses, composed after Hallam’s death, ‘was written under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, but that life must be fought out to the end.’ Last year, in midwinter, I read a portion at the funeral of my son, and a choir sang Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium, with its Christmas message of the hope that accompanied the birth of the boy Jesus.

Advent and Christmas are times to seek hope in darkness, hope that life matters despite its brevity. After an outing to his favourite zoo, when he was a small boy, I remember commenting to my wife that it was a shame our son would not likely remember it when he was grown. She replied that happiness is not valuable only if it lasts, or worthwhile only for being remembered.

Christmas, even in a Hollywood movie, is not meant to be free of sorrow, only to be where hope somehow triumphs over despair. The struggle is not avoidable, even with faith, and those Christians I know whose faith is greatest do not, because of it, find life easy. Perhaps our love and our happiness are the more precious for being temporary. That would seem to me to be one of the conclusions we reach at Christmas.

‘In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,’ concluded Shakespeare: ‘This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong /
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.’

Odd, that citrus fruit in winter. But as I peel them, the clementines – glowing with colour, like the oranges we studded with cloves as children – burst with their scent, reminding me of my childhood Christmases and those of my son. They make me wonder if somehow, in time, they will come to feel worth having lived.