“It is because nothing is equal, because everything bathes in its difference, its dissimilarity and its inequality, even with itself, that everything returns.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

“I don’t have any recollection of that at all.”
—Delbert Grady, The Shining

At this time of year, many of us are likely consumed with traditions.

For instance, hosting holiday parties and baking cutout cookies and sipping rum-spiked eggnog whilst wearing ugly sweaters and spinning Phil Spector’s Christmas album on vinyl have outlasted the ultrahip disdainful stance once held against these perennially problematic traditions.

Old-fashioned entertaining is hot again. So hot that an original shrink-wrapped copy of Martha Stewart’s 1982 debut book, Entertaining, was recently listed on eBay for $1,784.99. It seems as if the traditional decorating of yuletide evergreens is, well, evergreen.

Young people today appear more willing than previous generations to overlook, say, tree-hugging, or the Christian church’s misgivings, or Martha Stewart’s stint in prison for felony conspiracy, for the sake of revelling blissfully in the comfort of seasonal traditions.

And I’m here for it. I, too, have succumbed in 2025 to a host of holiday traditions that I once considered a tad naff.

What is it about traditions that are so ambivalently repellant and attractive? Why now is there a marked turn back toward them? And what is the difference between tradition and nostalgia?

Nostalgia to me is a misguided strategy for enduring the unendurable. A challenging present is apparently rendered tolerable by escaping into a mythologized past.

Retromania and poptimism characterized the first two and a half decades of 21^st century cultural production in which the relative safety of reconfiguring historical fashions was preferable to the risk of devising new ones. The nostalgic compulsion at once mourns the loss of a better future and replaces the utopian imagination. “Those who can’t remember the past,” writes Mark Fisher in Ghosts of My Life, “are condemned to have it resold to them forever.”

Close to home, we are seeing the resurgence of separatist sentiments in Quebec and Alberta, a local franchise of nostalgia’s troubling recurrences.

On the global stage, we have recently witnessed the acceptance of poisonous nostalgia writ large in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the nostalgic embrace of Soviet-era imperialism is proposed as the solution to the sprawling 35-year disarray surrounding the union’s dissolution.

Similarly, the “again” that punctuates the campaign slogan that the despot-in-chief south of the border adopted is evidence that a return to some idealized nationalistic standard is preferable to facing an unpredictable, unrecognizable future.

These political specimens invoke the most terrifying precedents in modern memory. Germany in the early 1930s was gripped by nostalgic hysteria that enabled unspeakable horrors. And fuelled by cultural nostalgia, Stalin concurrently engineered a famine-genocide that decimated Ukraine.

It is tempting to conflate nostalgia with tradition. Trump, like Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, veils his reactionary ideologies in a mock defence of the latter.

Culturally speaking, the popularity in 2025 of, for example, the band Geese — a sevenfold throwback to The Strokes, and Television before them, and Iggy and the Stooges before that — could be considered an affirmation of traditional Rock & Roll when it is really more like skipping stones over lake nostalgia.

The recurrent subject of authenticity is moot as a marker of value, too: there is no doubt that both Rock and Roll and genocide are authentic. Tradition relies equally upon authenticity to produce its legitimacy. Still, nostalgia and tradition for me represent the opposition between security and freedom, the tension between control society versus genuine liberation.

Here, we must pronounce a distinction between nostalgia and tradition.

Consider these two polarities against the fight-or-flight instinct, the classic responses to stress triggers. Doubtless, the uncertainty of contemporary life is a source of significant stress. Yet, where nostalgia is analogous to flight, a retreat from the frontlines of progressive momentum, tradition represents the fight for some nonetheless forward-facing stance through social cohesion and historical continuity. Nostalgia withdraws, while tradition soldiers on.

Personally, I have three Christmas traditions that are less an expression of nostalgia for me, and more an articulation of stubborn perseverance.

The first involves attending a performance of Handel’s Messiah. This year, I accomplished this tradition twice, once at Maison Symphonique with the OSM conducted by Rafael Payare, and again the very next day with the Orchestre Classique de Montréal’s annual rendition in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory. Although I have heard this Oratorio dozens of times, the tradition of it ironically immunizes me against menacing forces that lie beyond my control, insulating me from the interminable doomscroll.

My second holiday tradition is to see The Nutcracker, the ballet choreographed to Tchaikovsky’s renowned suite. I ticked this one off my holiday list on opening night thanks to a luxurious performance by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier.

This tradition has its origins in early childhood, when my parents took me and I would inevitably fall asleep during the first half, the kaleidoscopic visual aesthetics and hypnotic sonic rhythms lulling me in my comfortable auditorium seat with abundant winter heating into near-narcotic repose. Now, it is a new Christmas tradition to watch other people’s children slumbering through the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Third and likely counterintuitive is my annual screening of The Shining. More than It’s a Wonderful Life, Kubrick’s masterpiece is a Christmas movie par excellence. Don’t @ me.

Plus, this particular holiday tradition I realized just now speaks most directly to the concept itself of nostalgia versus tradition. “The nostalgia of The Shining,” writes Fredric Jameson in a 1981 essay, “takes the peculiar form of an obsession with the last period in which class consciousness is out in the open.” Jack Torrance is an avatar embodying the return of the repressed, now manifesting in the MAGA movement’s nostalgic preoccupation that in effect has underpinned capitalism’s violence in every one of its miserable iterations.

Through the exercise of tradition, I identify three important impulses: chemistry, preservation, and ritual. Chemistry precipitates a reaction and must be performed in a similar way every time to produce the desired result. Something like baking Christmas cookies. Preservation — words in print or music on vinyl — ensures the recognition of vital forms of sociocultural memory and the immediacy of material presence. And ritual, like decorating trees, is the irrational incantation of magic that serves to reorder chaos, just as the moon’s gravity reorders the ocean’s turbulence here on earth.

While pragmatic in function, these three impulses supersede logic and transcend analysis. And yet we analyse. Because it is tradition.

Instead of viewing nostalgia as a net negative, I prefer to interpret it as a harbinger of revolution. Nostalgia always precedes the triumph of the impossible. Traditionally, we tend to go back just before breaking through. Tradition is immanence anticipated. It resists melancholia, decline, failure. The antidote for simulation is reality, if even reality relived.

This is why I routinely revisit The Messiah, The Nutcracker, and The Shining — and Christmas baking and holiday entertaining and Martha Stewart. Not out of sentimentality for some bygone past, but rather, with a hope that the future, unshackled through chemistry, preservation, and ritual from the past, will once again achieve its traditional greatness.◼︎

_{Cover image: Bernardo Betancor photographed by Sasha Onyshchenko for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal.}