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Why are we adults so touched by sentimental stories about poor orphans with an obligatory happy ending? This seasonal “weakness” of ours combines nostalgia for childhood and the hope that we can change our destiny.
On a cold winter evening, sit comfortably on the couch and watch some movie or read a book with a touching story: about how a poor, lonely hero or heroine first wandered, froze and starved, offended by cruel people, and how happily their fate later changed …
In everyday life, we tend to do our best so that others do not take us for naive people. We do not often give vent to feelings, we do not believe in the promises of incredible happy endings, in any situation we want to remain realistic and generally stand on the ground as firmly as possible.
But once a year we can afford it – to relax and be sentimental: on New Year’s holidays, we seem to get permission (alone with ourselves or with our children) to plunge into childhood again. Allow yourself to feel like a child again. Believe in a happy ending and even cry over it …
Abandonment experience
The secret of the secret weakness for sentimental Christmas stories is that they speak directly to the childish part of the personality. In Christmastide stories, in stories of miraculous deliverances, we often talk about lonely, defenseless children, those who were left without parents. “These images excite us not by chance,” explains psychologist and fairy tale therapist Olga Khukhlaeva. “After all, the experience of abandonment is universal: in some corner of the soul of everyone – even the most successful and self-confident adult – still lives a lonely child, offended, unloved.”
Whatever family we once grew up in: happy (with caring and sensitive adults) or not very happy (where we lacked attention and warmth), we strove to be in the center of parental love and wanted to own them completely. And, of course, they could not realize this childhood fantasy of omnipotence. “A child’s attitude towards parents is always ambivalent,” continues Olga Khukhlaeva. – He loves them, but at the same time he is angry with them, offended, jealous. And sometimes, experiencing resentment, he imagines himself an orphan.
That is why fantasies that these real mother and father (who demand, punish, go about their business) are not real, but real (always kind, understanding everything) will definitely someday be found and surrounded by boundless love, touch the heart for a long time grown children at all times and in all countries.
Release the inner child
“The inner child is the spontaneous, playful, curious part of the personality,” says Jungian psychotherapist Larisa Kharlanova. “But for many of us, it manifests itself only as an indecisive, weak inner voice that the person himself does not listen to.” “With the modern cult of rationality, there is simply no room for the inner child,” agrees Olga Khukhlaeva.
But there are several mysterious winter days on the calendar, when adults seem to get the legal right to feel like children again. “The New Year holidays are almost the only time of the year when we can “legalize” our inner child, release it into the wild,” says Larisa Kharlanova. “Through the cyclicity, the repetition of the New Year’s ritual, we feel a connection with ourselves as little ones, with our parents and more distant ancestors, as well as with our own children.”
If a weak, offended by fate hero has succeeded, then we will succeed all the more.
Everything that helps us to be a child turns out to be healing. “When we, for example, read about a hungry baby who is freezing on the street, looking out the window where the lights are on and rich children are unwrapping gifts near a smart Christmas tree, we involuntarily project the image of our wounded inner child onto him,” explains Larisa Kharlanova. “And thanks to the indispensable happy ending, our “inner orphan” also receives consolation, a promise that everything will be fine. And of course, reading about someone who is weaker and more helpless than us, we feel better and stronger. If a weak, offended by fate hero succeeds, then we will succeed all the more.”
It is not surprising that so many generations of children and adults empathize with the fate of Oliver Twist and heroes like him. The same psychological mechanism explains the success of the most famous orphan of the last decade – Harry Potter. Trying on the fate of children who survived, having lost their parents and faced death face to face, all of us, regardless of age, receive a powerful charge of self-confidence.
Join the miracle
During the days of New Year’s miracles, we can not only get in touch with this forever inconsolable part of our personality, but also help – both our inner child and someone else who needs warmth and care. Larisa Kharlanova explains it this way: “Today, not everyone celebrates Christmas as a religious holiday, but we all remember that this day is associated with the birth of Jesus Christ. In his figure, two very strong archetypal images are combined – a baby and a savior. Thanks to their influence, it is on Christmas days that we feel with particular force our inner altruistic need to protect, help, do something good.
The master of sentimental Christmas stories, Charles Dickens, was sure that “Christmas is the time when, louder than at any other time of the year, the memory of all sorrows, insults and suffering in the world around us speaks in us, which can be helped encourages us to do good” .
meet fate
Another theme that excites us in such stories is the opportunity to change your destiny. New Year holidays are traditionally associated with magic and the other world. In Russia, they always guessed at Christmas time – during the period of the shortest days and longest nights, the border between the worlds seems to become permeable, allowing you to know the future. These days, we also have a special, magical feeling of a calendar gap (as Andrei Voznesensky wrote, “from the first to the thirteenth – the abyss between times …”), a transition to a different time and a state when familiar life freezes – and when you can influence the course events.
Book or screen plots in which incredible gifts of fate happen (lost children find their parents, hunger gives way to abundance, loneliness and cold on the street – the comfort and warmth of the hearth) feed our expectation of a miracle, a thirst for change, faith in what we have everything will work out.
“Our psyche perceives the New Year – a calendar turning point – as a starting point for new beginnings,” says Larisa Kharlanova. “Miracles, the salvation of the weak, transformations, new opportunities for those who could not and did not know how before – all this makes us believe that magic is possible.” The existence of forces that can change the fate of other people, even if they exist only on the pages of a book or on an invitingly burning screen, promises each of us fabulous happiness in our own lives …
“It is very important to believe that our world is kind”
“Andersen could afford to end the Christmas story about the girl with matches with an unhappy (from the point of view of today’s person) ending: the orphan froze, the lights burned, God accepted her innocent soul. I think that modern stories should be about goodness, which does not rely on higher powers. Or rely not only on them. A real Christmas story is about how hope comes where there was despair. How the exit and the light are where the walls and darkness were. It’s always about people who need help. And it’s always about the people who come to the rescue. For some reason, we still consider it a miracle.
My two books (“Where there is no winter” and “Three of your names”) are about orphans who have found a home. About foster parents who found their children. One of them ends just before Christmas – with the fact that the whole family gathers in the old, dear and beloved house, and it is warm in this house. I am sometimes told: this happy ending is made up, it is only to reassure the child reader. I really always try to make a book end well, even if there are tragic events in it. It seems to me that it is very important for children to believe that our world is kind, that happiness is possible and achievable, that everything is in our hands. But it’s not just my setup. The happy ending is not fictional, both books are based on real stories. Because real miracles happen in life – in recent years I have known many people who have adopted orphans.”