Christmas: The Power of Connection and Assigned Meaning

Photo by Jason Abdilla on Unsplash

Why does Christmas hold the meaning that it does? We can easily form an answer about what it means, to ourselves and to others, but never why it means what it means. Tradition, family and joy may spring to mind, but this time of year can also bring forward feelings of grief, tension, obligation, loneliness. In both cases, the rituals remain… but does the meaning? What is revealed about identity, social belonging and change through the eye of tradition, life stages and connection, and our assigned significance to the holiday season?

Recent longitudinal research looked into how people assign meaning to Christmas over their lives, providing insight into the way humanity creates meaning, how it continues, adapts and struggles when meanings once assigned no longer align with who we become. Meaning is not fixed; it changes over the life course. The meaning of Christmas does not remain stable. It shifts as roles shift from childhood to late adulthood, partner to caregiver. In childhood, the holidays are charged with wonder, anticipation and fixed ritual, and grows more complex with age. The addition of responsibility, expectation and anxiety layers on top. Some meanings stick, others dissipate. Societal norms often lag behind reality; a reminder that core values, culture and anchors of identity are not stable, but negotiable.

Christmas is centred around the ‘us’: time spent at tables, between generations, across distances. Relationships and changing roles shape the significance of the holidays. This echoes beyond the holiday itself: meaning is not a solo act, but a network effect. Christmas does not change, meaning is entangled in relationships, connection and rituals.

Humans do not simply recall memories; we use rituals to structure and form them. Christmas scaffolds the memory of past, present and future selves, shaping time continuity and identity. Rituals protect against chaos, preserving ideologies, but also restricting people into predictable patterns; simultaneous comfort and constraint. A rigid structure may transform into rigid meaning, allowing a gap to form when personal narratives move on.

Meaning is rarely constructed alone, it is relationally negotiated between parents, partners, children, friends and even those who are no longer present. It exists in the space between people. Maybe this is the reason Christmas time can feel so charged; a convergence point for unresolved dynamics, power shifts, unspoken expectations and inherited emotional contracts, all of which have lasting implications that succeed the holidays. Purpose at work, leadership identity, belonging all feel relational, but without understanding relationships, no one can understanding meaning.

Nostalgia is not innocent. The role of nostalgia plays a subtle but important role in the assigned meaning of Christmas, a proxy for ‘how things used to be’, a symbolic home, a recreation, that people try to revisit every year. While nostalgia may bring with it the warmth of the memory, it is also melancholic; it invites comparison, realisation of loss, not integration but idealisation and false truth. For some Christmas is a reminder of what is gone, a person, a lifestyle, one’s former self. For others it’s a performance of continuity that masks profound internal change. The danger is not in remembering the past, forgetting that meaning and memory are not always combined.

Growth calls for reinterpretation, maturation means letting old meanings fade. It is not a case of abandoning them, but releasing them with honesty, acknowledging what no longer feels true. People often face moments when Christmas no longer matches lived reality and has to be reimagined, some will embrace it and other will resist, but it cannot be escaped.

It is not just about Christmas, but how people navigate community and change, how stories shape reality, how identity evolves faster than rituals. Meaning, therefore, requires revisiting, it shouldn’t be assumed or blindly accepted, rituals should be interrogated rather than worshiped. It is not something that is purely inherited, but intertwined with growth and movement, Christmas is just when it’s more noticeable.

Christmas functions as an archetypal container, a symbolic moment when collective and personal unconscious material ebbs closer to the surface. Depth psychology would acknowledge the juxtapositions; light in darkness, birth in winter, not as cultural accidents but psychic patterns. Perhaps this is the reason Christmas evokes more than joy, the archetypes amplifying the unresolved, when grief resurfaces and family roles regress. Old identities, the ones whose needs have been silenced, reassert themselves. The shadow is never far away at Christmas, it exists in the unspoken resentment, unlived lives and the versions of the self thought to have been outgrown. Rituals designed to reassure us of continuity instead exposes the misalignment. Meaning is not only cognitively assigned, but inhabited emotionally and symbolically. When rituals stop working, it may be a message from the psyche requiring integration, not repetition.

To be able to preserve the light and sit with the darkness.

For the full longitudinal study published in the Bristol University Press, 2023, find the link here: Exploring the social power of Christmas: a prospective qualitative study of assigning meaning to Christmas along the life course in: Longitudinal and Life Course Studies Volume 14 Issue 1 (2023)

Follow The Heretic for more reflections on meaning and both individual and collective experience over the holiday season