I indulge more deeply in Christmas nostalgia with every passing year, but it turns out that doing so is a good thing.

“Nostalgia,” according to Merriam-Webster, is “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for the return to some past period or irrecoverable condition.”

Time is certainly irrecoverable. I wish I’d known, when I was child, that time would go by so incredibly fast – which makes me now long for my past.

I remember vividly one Christmastime Satur...