The Machine that Remembered Christmas

I. When a Season Becomes a Script

In past times, the seasons grew slowly; the leaves start to turn and the weather changes after the awkwardness of springtime. Christmastime arrives: the finding of the decorations box whose weight held the memories of years gone past. The choice of music, from a record or CD collection that spent the year covered in dust. The booking of parties and the selection of the right meals for the yearly feast.

The season began with the choice to be involved: untangling lights, rearranging the shape of a room, negotiating the small recipes between taste and tradition. Some of these things we do grudgingly, but they were all things that brought us into the season, getting us ready for the festive time of year. A choice we made to get involved, nothing started if we didn’t do something about it.

Weather benign or important, these rituals once shaped the season, but now technology start before we do. The machines execute the first gesture of the season, providing music lists or suggestions for gifts to buy. The season unfolds without the first movement of intention that made it ours. And as the warmth of the season begins to gather around us, we can’t help but wonder, if we don’t begin the rituals, then what meaning do we get from them?

II. Ritual as Memory in Motion

Why do we keep repeating the same gestures every December? We say it’s tradition, or that it helps us feel “in the spirit”, but there is the sense that older is hiding beneath it. Ritual has many important influences on us, and because these have evolved to bring us together, we will take a look at each of them to see their impact.

1. The Rhythm of Recurrence

Ancient societies used festivals to step outside the usual, linear flow of life. It was not just a mark in a calendar, or timestamp, they were renewing time by celebration. Eliade said that the world begins again every time we re-enact its creation, called it sacred time.

The notion that our rituals might actually repair time does make a strange kind of sense, like our ancestors from the past are calling to us to listen to their voices. The year always feels The days feel frayed by the end, scattered with too much to do and too much time lost. Maybe these festive rituals are a way of gathering time back up, of making sure that the circle of life completes itself at the end of the year. Even without the old mythologies, we still seem to crave that shape.

“But time was reborn, began again, because with each New Year the world was created anew.”^[1]

Eliade thought modern life had exiled us from this cyclical rhythm. Everything around us moves too fast to feel sacred. But each year, as lights go up and songs return, we start to sense the curve again. The world is refusing to move forward; our ancestors are calling us to pause, to reflect, to bring the circle of the year to a close.

2. The Comfort of Repetition

Rituals are not about finding new things, they are about returning to stability. Rituals slow time down. Byung-Chul Han is blunt: rituals make time habitable^[2]. Rituals are to time what a home is to space. In a culture of speed and movement, they supply places to dwell, idyllic pauses that slow experience and anchor attention.

“We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.”^[3]

Han argues that repetition is how we make time bearable. In a world that demands constant newness, rituals create stillness, they’re the patterns that calm the noise. Decorating our space with the same ornaments, hearing the same songs from collated playlists, and repeating the same greetings. All this repetition feels quite meaningful. It is like going back to something expected, small gestures that turn chaos into order.

3. The Social Bond

Émile Durkheim’s term, collective effervescence^[4], explains the thought that shared action is what binds people together. The moment when individuals “participate in the same action” and feel themselves “transported into an entirely different world” by acting in unison. Moving together, breathing together, even briefly, forms a kind of temporary unity that we can’t build any other way. Durkheim’s term seems to apply wonderfully to the festive season, one mass ritual that remains, that needs simultaneity to create a social glue.

For Durkheim, the real social glue was “beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community”. Shared rites that bring people together in the same acts at the same time.

Many of our collective rites have vanished in modern life. The social glue, for Durkheim, was shared rites that brought people together at the same time, “beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community”^[5]. The festive season, even when most people don’t think of it as sacred, is one of the remaining times that the world still moves in sync. Hanging lights, raising decorations, cooking, travelling home: these are all part of an unspoken language that bind us to one-another.

4. Repetition and Recollection

Our festive rituals, even though they repeat each year, do vary slightly. Same lights, same music, but some small changes are noticeable between the calendars. Someone missing, someone grown, someone new. And it it the repetition of rituals that shows us the change that has happened. The festive ritual is the stable element that highlights what has changed.

Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice; flatten the sentiment to “same river, different waters”. That is how the ritual allows us to witness the changes. Without it, we wouldn’t notice how much we’ve changed.

Kierkegaard offers another approach to repetition.

“Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward; whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.” ^[6]

Recollection looks backward and freezes experience; repetition leans forward and tries to rediscover meaning through looking backwards deliberatly. Can we take the same ritual, year-on-year, and notice what has changed?

Without a stable ritual, we lose track of time, and time blurs. With rituals, the difference has the ability to show, we get a festive lens to see what has changed in a year. That’s why a predictable sequence doesn’t deaden life; it allows us to show how life has grown in a year.

III. When Ritual Becomes a Background Service

We now have services in place that bring the season about with less of a burden to us. The music is already chosen, with playlists generated by algorithms. Films are curated by systems built to engage. Food arrives measured and half-prepared by food delivery services with the menu to curate your selections. Even the house can be decorated for you, using services that will hang the lights, arrange the tree, and build the ambience from a catalogue.

These are micro-enhancements engineered into modern systems, small gains sold with the ability to get more of your time back. The systems we use now have absorbed the labour that once marked the threshold between one year and the next. What was once a season that we had to create is now delivered. What was once slow and carried weight has been replaced by immediacy. The ritual begins, and your only task is to step inside it.

There is no blame in this. Automation does what it is built to do, making life easier and helping us to accomplish tasks with ease. With this, we may have lost some of our ritual. Reflection has been replaced by recollection. Once we sat in the stillness of a year's end remembering what mattered, we now watch what has been remembered for us, streamed back in fragments cut to length and put to music. Consideration gives way to convenience; the small questions no longer surface because the system knows the timing for everything. Agency is replaced by automation. And participation becomes pre-emption; the ritual has the festive spirit brought alive by the system's notice of the calendar.

IV. Learning the New Shape of Ritual

Every generation adds onto the rituals of old, adding new spice to the old recipes.

We don’t seem to get a say on whether we want to have these new rituals collide with our existing rituals. The world doesn’t return to older things just because we remember them; they seem to weasel their way into our established rituals without much say on our behalf. It would be easy to call this loss, but with zero effort on our part, we find ourselves standing between two versions of the same season, one receding and the other unfamiliar and untrustworthy.

The old gestures may be thinning, draining into smoother, lighter versions of themselves, but something always grows in that empty space. New patterns emerge and new meanings attach to them. And without realising it, we begin to repeat them until repetition gives them weight. Small acts gathering gravity over years.

How, then, do we carry the ancestry of the old ways into a world shaped by younger ways? The symbols we inherited were built from a rhythm we no longer live inside of; their meanings rose from labour, from slowness, from shared time. The new symbols come to us from convenience, speed, and quiet automation that illuminates the pathway ahead. It’s It's difficult to predict what will survive. Some meanings will fade and others may return in forms we don’t recognise. Some of us will mourn what we lost without being able to accept what we found.

Rituals are not fixed objects; they are adaptations and responses to life passed to us. They change because we change. They develop according to the shape of life. While the old rituals may not persist in their original form, they can still evolve if we allow them to.

Every generation walks through the same uncertainty, inheriting the season's rituals that don’t quite fit and leaving behind rituals they didn’t mean to touch. The children who come after us will build their own season, one that reflects the world they inherit rather than the world we remember.

Ritual has never been about preserving the past perfectly. It has always been about carrying something forward

V. Where Old Ritual Brushes New Code

We have the sense that automation and artificial intelligence is removing humans from the picture, as if someone was using Photoshop to erase family members from photos. The sense is that these digital changes are making us less human and more machine. While that may be true, our rituals have always adapted to the times. Families have carried remnants of meaning across continents, across wars, across years that nearly ended them. Societies have rebuilt rituals from fragments, adjusting them to new times.

But there is something about the automation shift around the festive time that feels heavier. Perhaps because it carries more than simple repetition, it carries inheritance. Memory. It carries the weight of people we no longer see. The year’s end amplifies everything that came before it, and when the things we find important change, it feels personal. It is not only a cultural shift. The old ways do not disappear; they simply fade from their original shapes. The new ways do not feel empty; they simply lack the depth that time once carved into the older forms.

The old rituals still whisper beneath the new ones we chose to pass on. They always have. They always will. Ritual has never been fragile; it endures because each generation shapes it with whatever tools they have, whatever tenderness they can afford. The past holds its own gravity, and even now, when the rituals arrive with systems that thrive in their presence, we can still feel the weight of what came before. Gestures are repeated long enough to become memories, and memories are repeated long enough to create meaning.