In 1975, as the war in Vietnam drew to an ignominious end and as the Middle East teetered on another period of instability, Greg Lake sat in West London and composed a purposefully miserable Christmas song; I Believe in Father Christmas.

The work is a last blast of counter-culture, designed to tell people that their memories are false and their illusions are wicked. Verses refer to Jesus – ‘the Israelite’ – as ‘a Fairy Story’ and depict a child ‘seeing through the disguise’ of Father Christmas. The music video was accompanied by clips of war around the world, designed as a cruel reality check to festive naivety. The message was clear: enjoying festive nostalgia is just another form of blindness, and one that puts you roundly in the hands of ‘the man’.

The irony is that its popularity as a song, and its continued presence in Christmas playlists ever since, came from the orchestrator’s decision to include a section of Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije Suite in between the verses. Prokofiev’s music is a deliberate mimicry of an old-style Russian sleigh ride and it stirred festive emotions among listeners, despite the chances of any of them having sped across the steppe in a troika being very low indeed. Memory therefore – even one from a far-off land, even one that might be palpably false – played an undoubted role in the song’s success.

That isn’t especially surprising. Memory is at the very heart of Christmas. In part, it is the need for communal memory to establish traditions. It is difficult to perpetuate familial or community habits without a shared memory of what has gone before: that isn’t nostalgia but common sense. Doing the same thing every year also provides stability as well as refreshment. The Feasts of the Church still shape the Western calendar for a reason: they worked.

There is a tired and boring modern trope that Christmas was invented by the Victorians. The professional ‘historian here’ class tends to assume that all traditions are mere nostalgia for an imagined past, created in the 19th century and to be thrown off by anyone enlightened. I was never quite enough of a radical to work out who ‘the man’ was meant to be, but I sincerely doubt he cares if you have a nut roast in lieu of turkey for your Christmas meal. As with so much pseudo-radicalism with its roots in the late 20th century, the imagined past is in fact only present in the heads of those who rail most vigorously against it. Yet it shows that the seasonal presentation of memory as a thing for other, stupider people isn’t limited to faded rockers of the 1970s.

Key to this narrative of Christmas as Victorian invention is, of course, Charles Dickens. Yet, far from being nostalgia slop, A Christmas Carol, subverts and plays with memory in a much cleverer way than we might first realise. Indeed, the very premise of a Christmas ghost story is Dickens playing with tradition and nostalgia. Ghost stories had been a part of Christmas tradition for centuries, and a recognisably English one, which contrasted with the fashionable Germanic traditions that swept Victorian Britain. Evocation, too, of hearth and home, the past seasonal hospitality of rural Tory England of squire and parson, is contrasted with the Manchester School version of the festive season embodied by Scrooge. Then there are the facts of the story’s plot themselves. Memory undoubtedly does play a key part in Dickens’ work; yet it is not nostalgia but memory with the power to change, memory as a facet not just of the past or present but of the future as well.

It is in this final aspect that Dickens speaks most authentically of the reality of Christmas. A Christmas with transformative memory and the elision of past, present and yet to come at its heart is a profoundly theological understanding of the Feast. The Nativity itself is, at least in part, an exercise in remembering. Matthew begins his infancy narrative with the genealogy of Christ. His text then heaves with evocations of prophecies made to the people of God, allusions to the Messiah made in the past. The entire narrative is an attempt to jog the collective memory of Israel. They were told about this, after all.

By contrast, Luke begins with the Magnificat, the song of Mary. In it, future and past are elided by the monumental events of the present: ‘behold from henceforth, all generations shall call me blessed’ and ‘as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed forever’ can both be true realisations of the Incarnation. Both evangelists pepper their narrative not only with remembered prophecies from the Old Testament, but also with predictions for the future. The magnitude of God become man necessarily collapses our human understandings of time, and therefore memory.

Perhaps the most profound and important manner in which the Christmas story does this is in its evocations of a pre-lapsarian past. Not just evocations of the time when there was ‘peace on earth and goodwill towards men’, but the opening of the possibility of a return to that time. By the child in the manger, a door is opened to a return to man’s childhood, pre-Fall. So, contra Greg Lake, evocations of childhood at Christmas are not so facile after all. A possible return to the state of man’s innocency is part of the promise of the Incarnation. Born, as Wesley put it, that man no more may die.

Because of this, memory is not just at the heart of Christmas: it would be more accurate to say that Christmas has entirely transfigured how we think about memory. Every Christmas I think of Quirinius, a career civil servant and regular toady, whose professional apex was his appointment as governor of Syria. Doubtless he expected to be memorialised in Roman marble, remembered as an efficient part of the machinery of an empire which could never fade. It was not to be so.

He would be remembered, almost exclusively, as the governor in charge when a child was born. He probably wasn’t even aware of this child’s existence. Or if he heard rumour of it, he quickly dropped it from his memory. A baby was, after all, an unimportant thing to the Romans. Quirinius, after all, had bigger concerns, greater dreams, a place in the Empire’s eternal memory. How strange he would find it today to know that each year his name is spoken across the world, but only as a bit player in an event round which the whole grammar of history is now constructed. He is part of global memory, but just not how he expected to be. From Quirinius to Greg Lake, there have always been those who have been mistaken about the role of memory in the arc of Christmas. It is the time when past, present and future combine, and, to coin a phrase, the hopes and fears of all the years, are met in one place, in one person, in one God. It is a time, not for nostalgia at all, but for remembering of a world-changing kind.