When 23-year-old Olivia Davis spent the afternoon walking through a Christmas market in Newcastle, she expected to feel it.
Lauren Toby, 22, thought she’d be overcome with the sensation when watching a Christmas film with a festive-flavoured drink.
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Luckily, Braden Lee-Stevens, 33, managed to sense it briefly – when taking his 18-month-old nephew to meet Santa for the first time. But then it went away.
With just a few days until Christmas, none of these people are able to feel it. You know, it. ‘Christmassy’.
It’s a common complaint at this time of year. In the past week, people taken to X, formerly Twitter, to say that they ‘don’t feel Christmassy, and on forums from Mumsnet to Reddit, people are frantically asking why they can’t feel the Christmas spirit – as though it’s a disease ready to be diagnosed.
Yet Christmassy isn’t technically an emotion. What exactly is it – and why is it that so many of us worry when we can’t ‘feel’ Christmas?
‘Feeling Christmassy is not a simple emotion but a combination,’ Patricia Riddell, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Reading’s school of psychology, tells Metro.co.uk. Riddell explains that the happiness, surprise, awe, and love we feel at Christmas release both dopamine (the reward molecule) and oxytocin (the hormone that causes us to feel attached to people we are close to).
The problem, Riddell says, is that anticipation can lead to disappointment.
‘Our brain does not assess how happy we are but the difference between how happy we expected to be and how happy we actually are,’ she explains. By over-anticipating Christmas, we raise our expectations of happiness and therefore feel less happy than we expected.
Riddell also says that ‘when we make sense of events, we lose the emotional intensity’ – a point echoed by Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at Le Moyne College, who invented the Nostalgia Inventory Test, a measure for how deeply people feel nostalgic.
‘Based on our childhood experiences, Christmas has acquired unrealistic expectations of mythical ideas,’ says Krystine, explaining that childhood myths about Santa and magic allowed us to suspend reality at Christmastime.
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‘As adults, we know we can never again enjoy those wondrous feelings and beliefs… It isn’t surprising, then, that many people are disappointed when they don’t experience the fulfillment of the promise of Christmas.’
Batcho notes that many of us try to do Christmas activities to get in the holiday spirit – like Olivia’s market, Lauren’s drink, and Bradley’s trip to Santa. Anyone with a love of The Muppets knows that it’s in the singing of the street corner choir (and going home and getting warm by the fire), but why might doing Christmas activities not actually prompt that special Christmassy feeling?
‘Often, doing something that seemed so amazing when we were a child is a bit disappointing when we do it as an adult,’ Batcho says. ‘The gingerbread house we make now is nowhere near as amazing as the one we remember. Our memories are often rosier than reality.
‘Also, as adults we’re often feeling stressed as we try to meet all the demands of our regular lives and the additional obligations of doing all the holiday activities. What was once a joyful experience can now be felt as burdensome.’
It is certainly easier, as we age, to feel the burden of Christmas.
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Olivia, from South Shields, says she normally feels like December is ‘a different month’ from the rest of the year because she enjoys ‘the magic of it’. But a recent breakup with her partner of seven years means this year is more difficult.
‘It’s so, so hard to recapture the magic,’ she tells us. ‘It’s different as a child, you can enjoy it for what it is… you don’t have the stress of buying presents and money catching up with you in months to come.’
Callum Griffin, a 22-year-old from Exeter, says that work means he hasn’t had time to do his usual Christmas traditions. He complains of not feeling as ‘festive’ as he ‘should’. ‘I was definitely more excited in previous years,’ he says.
But was he? Brian Hughes, a professor of psychology at NUI Galway, who has written in the past about the psychological impact of Christmas, says that last Christmas might not have been as great as you think.
‘It is helpful to recall that today’s underwhelming banalities will eventually be filtered from our memories, and in the future we will look back nostalgically on [this year] with a sense of mystical yuletide wonder,’ he says.
Hughes explains that we respond to our memories with emotions, and physiologically feel the sensations of the past – be they excitement or sadness. Yet the distortions of nostalgia mean we only remember extreme emotions, so this re-experienced memory is biased and thus somewhat ‘false’.
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‘We filter out the mundanity,’ he explains. ‘In that sense, it is good for us to step back and realise the selective nature of our memories, and to not feel too sad when we compare the past to the present.’
Of course that doesn’t mean we should give up trying to feel Christmassy or that feeling the spirit of Christmas is a myth. Hughes explains that instead we need to put less pressure on ourselves and be psychologically flexible.
‘Christmas is highly visible and almost unavoidable, so people tend to develop structured ideas, or schemas of what Christmas should and should not involve,’ he explains. ‘People tend to visualise an idealised version of Christmas… the ideal and the actual seldom coincide.
‘This is why, in psychology, we encourage people to be adaptable and flexible. Feeling that you must conform to a detailed, idealised template of Christmas makes everything very pressurised.’
You might actually feel more Christmassy, then, if you give up the gingerbread-making session and just relax.
Batcho thinks we ‘can’t ever’ recapture the same pure Christmas feelings we had as children. ‘We now know too much,’ she says. ‘We know the difference between fantasy and reality and can only hope to feel similar sensations’.
Yet although we cannot feel identical sensations, the psychologist says we can feel new ones.
‘Although they’re not exactly identical, they can in some ways be richer,’ she says, ‘As we are now the ones ‘making Christmas’ for others – especially children.’
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Category: WHY
