As a kid, Christmas always felt like the day that held all of time together. Like a magic blanket that wrapped itself around us all at the end of the year.

Life was timeless then. Everything was in the present tense. Of course, I already had memories. But I didn’t feel time passing – like a hand waving from a train I want to be on some days. Today was all I felt. Even when I would say, “When I grow up…” there was still always an edge of disbelief to it. How could I ever be anything other than just a kid?

Christmas lets me remember being nine again. A hot mess of peanut butter and Tang, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by 9:30. Or, I can be 17. The first Christmas I can remember with all of my siblings at home. I thought Mom might die of happiness that year.

But suddenly, it’s today’s December. I’m not 17 anymore and I haven’t been 17 for a very long time. Instead, I’ve become quietly seized by the nostalgia that overcomes you when you’ve reached the middle of your life, and your mother has recently died, and it dawns on you that when she went, she took some of you with her.

It’s a reminder that it takes such a long time before you know that there really is no going back to anything. That life — with its seemingly endless childhood Christmases — is a series of moments strung together with the love we saw reflected and the love we felt, but moments can’t stay. Whether you ask them to or not.

And the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, you suddenly realize that those moments – those hours, those days you loved the most – they seem to leave the quickest. 

It happens to us all. Over time, we quietly come to share this in common. We end up burdened by the same losses, the same unanswerable questions and sadnesses — the same longings for times and places and people past. We’re all tapped into an undercurrent of humanity that connects us invisibly with so many others who feel exactly as we do, each in their own lives.

Eventually, we all become a little nostalgic. We long for what is permanently lost. We miss what we remember. And we let those memories make hallowed ground out of some of the most mundane places.

Some people say that those “good old days” are a myth. That no one ever thought they were that good at the time. And I just think it’s strange. How often we barely notice the best moments of our lives – except when looking back. 

I sometimes wonder if it would be different if memory could flow in reverse — from old to young. Like in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Or in the entry about “avenoir” in John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a beautifully expressive collection of new words for the emotions we all feel but find hardest to describe.

Avenoir is defined as the desire that memory could flow backwards. Koenig says that we all take for granted that life moves forward. You build memories; you build momentum, he says. But we all move through life as a rower moves: facing backwards. You can see where you’ve been, but not where you’re going.

“It’s hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way. Avenoir.

You’d see your memories approaching for years, and watch as they slowly become real. You’d know which friendships will last, which days are important, and you could prepare for upcoming mistakes. You’d go to school, and learn to forget.

One by one you’d patch things up with old friends, enjoying one last conversation before you meet and go your separate ways. And then your life would expand into epic drama. The colors would get sharper, the world would feel bigger.

You’d become nothing other than yourself, reveling in your own weirdness. You’d fall out of old habits until you could picture yourself becoming almost anything.

Your family would drift slowly together, finding each other again. You wouldn’t have to wonder how much time you had left with people, or how their lives would turn out.

You’d know from the start which week was the happiest you’ll ever be, so you could relive it again and again. You’d remember what home feels like, and decide to move there for good.

You’d grow smaller as the years pass, as if trying to give away everything you had before leaving. You’d try everything one last time, until it all felt new again. And then the world would finally earn your trust, until you’d think nothing of jumping freely into things, into the arms of other people.

You’d start to notice that each summer feels longer than the last. Until you reach the long coasting retirement of childhood. You’d become generous, and give everything back. Pretty soon you’d run out of things to give, things to say, things to see. By then you’ll have found someone perfect; and she’ll become your world. Your mother.

And then, you will have left this world just as you found it. Nothing left to remember, nothing left to regret, with your whole life laid out in front of you, and your whole life left behind.”

Eventually, most things become a memory that we return to. And I don’t think those things would be any more significant — or any less — whether we lived or remembered our lives forward or backward. Christmas would still weave its nostalgic spell. It would still be a day infused with some inescapable, intangible essence — like a fragrance — that secures its place as a day of remembrance. When we remember everything that we have ever loved.