The Beautiful Work of Nostalgia
The Beautiful Work of Nostalgia
In the rhythms of Advent, memory begins to stir. Recently, in a conversation with Dr. Edie Wadsworth on her House of Joy podcast, we touched on nostalgia as more than longing for the past—it is the disciplined work of remembering rightly. It invites us to return to the places where beauty shaped us.
What follows is a deeper meditation on that theme.
I want to touch on something Edie and I briefly spoke about on the podcast.
Nostalgia.
Nostalgia gets a bad reputation sometimes. People dismiss it as sentimentality, as if looking back somehow weakens us or distracts us from “real life.”
But nostalgia — true nostalgia — is not kitsch, and it’s not escapism.
Nostalgia is remembering. And remembering is one of the holiest acts a human can do.
The Difference Between Sentimentality and Sentiment
One of the reasons nostalgia feels confusing is because we blend two very different things: sentimentality and sentiment.
They sound similar, but they belong to different worlds.
Think of sentimentality as embodied in the mass-produced knick-knacks, the plastic ornaments, the commercial “holiday cheer” that tries to manufacture a feeling.
It’s nostalgia turned commodity. It’s shallow because it asks nothing of you—and beauty, by the way, does the exact opposite. It requires something of you. Sentimentality is just decoration layered onto the noise of the season.
But sentiment, the kind C.S. Lewis defends, is something altogether different.
Think of sentiment in the same realm as ordered affection. It is the capacity to feel rightly about what is worthy.
This is the ordo amoris Augustine loved to talk about. It’s the cultivation of love so that our hearts respond to the beautiful, the good, and the true. For Aristotle, this was moral formation.
Lewis called it the training of our emotions.
Advent actually depends on this.
You can’t receive the beauty of the Incarnation with a hollow heart. You need awakened affections to recognize the miracle hidden in the ordinary.
Nostalgia as Holy Memory
And that’s where nostalgia becomes a gift again. Not the sentimental plastic, but the memories that shaped you. In the episode, I mention a few of them, and I’m sure you can list your own.
… the candlelit sanctuary,
… the sound of laughter from another room,
… the smell of mulled wine in a British pub,
… the wrapping of gifts in a quiet upstairs room,
… the small beauties that formed your sense of home.
These shape your affections, form your heart, and prepare you to receive Christ.
Nostalgia becomes holy when it teaches us how to love again. That’s the difference. And that’s why it matters for Advent.
Your Stirring Memories
Think about this season.
As the year winds down, most of us are running hard, finishing work projects, juggling school/homeschool events, planning travel, buying gifts, navigating complicated family systems, trying to squeeze meaning into the margins of our fatigued lives.
And yet, woven through the exhaustion, something else begins to stir.
Your memories.
Think about how many Christmases we’ll experience; seventy, maybe eighty. But only a handful will remain vivid in our hearts. And they will be the ones marked by laughter, warmth, belonging, ache (that good kind of longing), or grace.
You don’t remember the plastic trinkets. You don’t know the mass-produced decorations; in fact, you can’t wait to trash them. And you certainly don’t remember the sale you chased or the Amazon box you opened.
You remember people. You remember moments.
You remember the song on a playlist that awakens something tender in you.
You remember wrapping presents upstairs while hearing the hum of laughter beneath you.
You remember candlelight services, frost on windows, bonfires in the dark.
You remember the jokes, the tears, and the late-night storytelling.
You remember love and the embodied moments where something in the air reaches out to you. And it whispers … “Remember.”
That’s nostalgia; holy memory, the recovery of something that mattered.
When Nostalgia Pushes Back
In The Abolition of Man and The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis famously wrote that the problem with modern people is not that we feel too much, but that we feel too little.
We are taught to distrust our affections. We are trained to live in what he calls “a desert of feelings,” where good emotions dry up and life becomes a flat, pragmatic march. Our world pushes noise, numbing, and nonchalance.
But nostalgia pushes back against that. It wakes us. It reminds us that there is a way to feel rightly. Nostalgia reminds us what good feels like. It reminds us what beautiful feels like. It calls us back to the things that shaped us in love.
A Memory That Formed Me
One of my own clearest memories — I talk about it in my “The Sound and the Fury” essay, which you’ll find in Oh Night Divine — comes from a winter night in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
There I sat on our bedroom floor. The window was cracked open, and the cold air came through, chilling the room just right. Outside, the moon lit up a blanket of snow. I was upstairs alone, just listening.
My family was downstairs laughing, telling stories, clinking plates. The smell of pie and roasted pecans drifted up the stairs.
That moment did something to me. It still does.
It taught me what “home” feels like. What belonging sounds like, what beauty tastes like, and what goodness whispers like.
And even now, a decade later, that memory shapes how I make a home for my own kids. It shapes what I want our holidays to feel like, the traditions I choose, and the atmosphere I try to cultivate.
Nostalgia has become a guide, a telos, a way of directing my life toward what matters.
When Nostalgia Turns to Worship
That’s what nostalgia is for. It’s remembering what is worth repeating.
It’s a compass, a quiet guide toward the abundant life Christ promised.
The beauty of nostalgia is that it helps us pay attention to what was, so we can recognize what is.
And Advent, of all seasons, is the place where nostalgia turns into worship. Because every small, beautiful memory points us toward the God who enters our ordinary lives with extraordinary love.
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